Calle De Los Negros article by Cesar Lopez 2012.pdf

Lost in Translation:

From Calle de los Negros to Nigger Alley to North Los Angeles Street to Place Erasure, Los Angeles 1855–1951 By César López abstract: This paper traces the short Los Angeles byway once known as Calle de los negros (later known as Negro Alley or Nigger Alley, briefly as an extension of Arcadia Street, later still as a frontage section of North Los Angeles Street), its changing human and spatial geography, and its eventual erasure, to uncover the historical processes of bringing social and spatial order to a zone considered disorderly from 1855 to 1951.

Keywords: Negro Alley, Los Angeles Plaza, Place Erasure, Chinese in Los Angeles, Mexican Los Angeles

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t 5:30 p.m. on October 24, 1871, gunfire erupted near the old Plaza of Los Angeles on a short street known as Negro Alley, in the city’s Chinatown section. After a night of mayhem and looting by an Anglo and Latino mob, the Los Angeles Daily News reported the names and causes of death of eighteen Chinese victims of the massacre: A strange and repulsive sight was that which presented itself to the eye in the yard of the city jail, yesterday… [T]heir bodies were ghastly and distorted, many of them besmeared with blood, and pierced with bullets. There [sic] bodies were mangled and disfigured, while most of them had their clothing either in tatters, or stripped off their persons.

Southern California Quarterly, Vol. 94, No. 1, pp. 25–90. ISSN 0038-3929, eISSN 2162-8637. © 2012 by The Historical Society of Southern California. All rights reserved. Request permission to photocopy or reproduce article content at the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website at http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/ scq.2012.94.1.25.

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southern california quarterly Those who met their fate at the hands of the lynchers, had the cords… still attached to their necks.1

The Chinese Massacre of 1871 was a flashpoint of violence that links Los Angeles Chinese history on the plaza to a particular historical narrative about restoring order.2 It may seem contradictory to refer to a lynching spree as a means to restore order, except that this short street had already taken on a popular image of racial, moral, and spatial disorder in which a rampage against those perceived disorders could be justified by participants as righting wrongs. As social critic Slavoj Zizek puts it, our society regularly uses forms of violence to “sustain our very efforts to fight violence and to promote tolerance.”3 This paper traces the history of Calle de los negros (later known as Negro Alley or Nigger Alley, briefly as an extension of Arcadia 1. For lack of a site marker, the names of the dead are listed here. Los Angeles Daily News, October 26, 1871. “The following is a list of the dead and the attributed causes of their death: No. 1 was the Chinese Doctor, known here by the name of Gene Tong; but given in evidence before the Coroner as Chee Long Tong, was divested of his nether garments, and had been shot through the head and hanged. No. 2. Wa Sin Qaai, who was represented as having been a resident of Negro Alley for five years, had received eight shots in the abdomen and legs. No. 3. Chang Wan, a resident of the Doctor’s house, had met his death by hanging. No. 4. Leong Quai died from hanging. No. 5. Joung Burrow was shot through the head and left wrist. These five were members of the Chin Woa Company. No. 6 was the body of Ah Long, a cigar manufacturer, who had been hanged. No. 7. Wong Chin, a member of the Win Young Company, had also been hanged. Three cartridges were found in his pockets. No. 8. Tong Wan had been shot, stabbed, and hanged. He was a member of the same company as No. 7, and had only arrived by the last steamer from San Francisco. No. 9. Ah Loo, a member of the Hap Waa Company, and who had only just arrived from China, had also been hanged. No. 10. Wan Foo, of the Win Young Company, was hanged. No. 11. Day Kee was hanged. No. 12. Ho Hing was hanged. No. 13. Ah Waa, a member of the Ah Young Company, had been hanged. No. 14. Ah Cut, a liquor manufacturer, had been shot in the abdomen and extremities. He was a member of the Sam Yap Company. No. 15. Lo Hey, of the Wong Young Company, was hanged. No. 16. Ah Wan, a member of the Win Young Company, received his death by hanging. No. 17. Wing Chee, of the Sam Yup Company, had been shot and hanged. No. 18, which lay at the cemetery, where he had been taken as soon as hanged, being the first victim, was unidentified” 2. Alejandro Morales’ historical novel The Brick People describes the carnage of bodies in a story based on the 1871 massacre of the Chinese in Los Angeles. Morales’s engaging work memorializes the narrative of violence as “restoring order.” Alejandro Morales, The Brick People (Houston: Arte Publico Press, 1988), 23. 3. Slavoj Zizek, Violence (New York: Picador, 2008), 1.



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Street, later still as a frontage section of North Los Angeles Street),its changing human and spatial geography, and its eventual erasure to uncover the historical processes of bringing social and spatial order to a zone considered disorderly from 1855 to 1951. Calle de los negros was a minor street with a racialized history that has been a part of the master narrative of the Los Angeles plaza area since the Mexican era. It was located just east-southeast of the plaza. Its later names, Negro Alley and Nigger Alley, were once synonymous with the original Calle de los negros. With the transformation of the old city center in the late nineteenth century, investor-built brick buildings leased to Chinese tenants began to replace the characteristic adobes on the eastern side of the plaza. The concentration of the Chinese community on the plaza, with Negro Alley as its center, created a racial-

Fig. 1. Calle de los negros or “Nigger Alley,” about 1875. This was the scene of the 1871 Chinese Massacre. The long low building in the center was the old Coronel adobe, divided into shops rented to Chinese merchants. The byway to the right is the infamous alley; the open space in the foreground is the end of Los Angeles Street. The Lafayette Hotel’s coach has stopped outside Marjett’s saloon where beer sold for five cents. Courtesy of the University of Southern California Libraries, Title Insurance and Trust/C.C. Pierce Photography Collection.

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ized vision of the area and spurred the process of forgetting its past.4 In turn, private property interests and civic efforts to open and extend Los Angeles Street erased the names of Calle de los negros and Nigger Alley and altered the street’s physical form.5 The history of the names Calle de los negros, Negro Alley, and Nigger Alley, and the social history of the space it occupied contrast and can be measured against the narratives of the development of racial tourist attractions (Olvera Street, 1930; China City, 1938; and New Chinatown, 1939). These racial tourist attractions were themed on the mythologies of a romanticized Spanish and Mexican past, an exotic Chinese present, and a modern future embodied in the newly built environment that included Union Station (1939). The final reorganizing of Los Angeles Street in conjunction with the construction of the Hollywood freeway completed the erasure of Nigger Alley from the plaza landscape in 1951. Efforts to preserve the east side of the 400 and 500 blocks of North Los Angeles Street, along with the historic Lugo House (1838) and an original section of “old Chinatown” that would have also included Nigger Alley, were not a part of the “selective preservation” envisioned by the backers of a state historic park formed at the plaza in 1953.6 This essay reconnects these layers of history and reveals some of the reasons why Nigger Alley continues to matter in understanding the racialized history of the Los Angeles plaza area. Calle de los Negros, 1840s–1850s The Significance of a Street’s Name Calle de los negros was the name used to describe a short byway connected to the central Plaza of El Pueblo de Los Angeles during the 1840s and ’50s, an example of a place that is actively forgotten in the history of Los Angeles. 4. I frame my use of racialized space as a merger of the concept of racial formation with the growing literature on the significance of space, memory and the built environment. Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s (New York: Routledge, 1994), 55–61. 5. Los Angeles Pocket Atlas, (Los Angeles: Renie Atlas Publications, 1943), 044. This map lists Negro Alley as “Negro AL.” 6. William David Estrada, The Los Angeles Plaza: Sacred and Contested Space (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008), 242–245. Estrada explains how the local Chinese community included the Lugo House (1838) and the other remaining sections of the original Chinatown in the preservation debates of the 1940s. However, as a result of what Estrada labels “selective preservation” on the part of Ms. Christine Sterling and other supporters of El Pueblo, a significant historic building of the Mexican era and other buildings (and street blocks) that were a part of the original Chinatown were demolished.



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Fig. 2. A 1944 map by Ruth Saunders and Ana Begue de Packman, based on a railroad survey map, depicts the Los Angeles plaza area as it was in 1853, when old Californio families still owned many of the surrounding properties. The street name, Calle de los negros, appeared on property records in 1850; four years later the street was called Negro Alley in legal records. Ana Begue de Packman, “Landmarks and Pioneers of Los Angeles in 1853,” Historical Society of Southern California Quarterly 26, nos. 2/3 (June-September 1944), map by Ruth Saunders in frontispiece. Courtesy Oviatt Library, California State University, Northridge.

The physical existence of Calle de los negros most likely originated before the US takeover of California (1848). However, the 1849 Plan de la Ciudad de Los Angeles, surveyed and drawn by Lieutenant E.O.C. Ord, U.S.A., and William R. Hutton, does not list a street name at the site where Calle de los negros was located.7 Calle de los negros is listed in the 1853 United States Pacific Rail Road Exploration and Survey map from which Ana Begue de Packman and Ruth Saunders drew a map published in 1944 (Fig. 2).8 And in 1856, an official city 7. “Plan de la Ciudad de Los Angeles, surveyed & drawn by E.O.C. Ord, Lt. U.S.A. & Wm. R. Hutton afst [sic],” August 29, 1849. The original Ord map is housed in the Los Angeles City Archives. The Ord map does not list a street name where Calle de los negros is located on the map. 8. Ana Begue de Packman, “Landmarks and Pioneers of Los Angeles in 1853,” Historical Society of Southern California Quarterly 26, nos. 2/3 (June-September 1944), map by Ruth Saunders in frontispiece; 76.

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map and professional survey of the plaza area showed the short street and revised its name from Calle de los negros to Negro Alley.9 In 1873, the name Calle de los negros appears again on a professional map of the plaza area, this time created by surveyor A. G. Ruxton (Fig. 3).10 The Spanish name Calle de los negros did not necessarily carry negative connotations among Californio Angelenos. In the Spanish and Mexican periods (1781–1821 and 1822–1848, respectively), the word negros had multiple origins which became associated with the Los Angeles plaza area during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Negro is Spanish for “black” and is used to describe dark-skinned persons. The word has been used since the sixteenth century to identify Africans in connection with colonial imperialism around the world. Under the Spanish colonial casta system, legal doctrines and casta paintings linked race and social status; however, as Vladimir Guerrero has pointed out, in frontier areas “the terminology of caste was related to racial composition in an imprecise and inconsistent way, reflecting the fact that social position depended as much on socioeconomic and geographic factors as it did on race.”11 Mulatos were identified among the 1781 settlers of El Pueblo de la Reina de Los Angeles. The Spanish-colonial census of Alta California listed residents as: Español, Mestizo, Negro, Chino, Mulato or Indio.12 The labeling of the dark-skinned Mexicans as Mexican negros (afromestizos or mulattoes) did not necessarily position them at the bottom of a racial order.13 Under the casta system, the word negro by itself 9. W.W. Robinson, Maps of Los Angeles, from Ord’s Survey of 1849 to the End of the Boom of the Eighties (Los Angeles, 1966), 100–102. I used Map 9, “Plaza in Los Angeles City Califia [sic].” Surveyed August 16th, September 12th, and December 1st, 1856, by Adolphus F. Waldemar, D.C.S. On this map, the street is named Negro Alley. 10. A. G. Ruxton, surveyor, “Map of the Old Portion of the City surrounding the plaza showing the Old Plaza Church, Public Square, The First Gas Plant and Adobe Buildings. Los Angeles City, March 12th, 1873.” Solano Reeve Collection. Los Angeles Public Library. 11. Vladimir Guerrero, “Caste, Race, and Class in Spanish California,” Southern California Quarterly 92:1 (Spring 2010): 2. 12. William M. Mason, “Los Angeles Under the Spanish Flag: Spain’s New World,” Southern California Genealogical Society (2004): 66. 13. See Martha E. Sánchez,“Shakin’ Up” Race and Gender: Intercultural Connections in Puerto Rican, African American, and Chicano Narratives and Culture (1965–1995) (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005). “Mexican Negros” refers to the legacy of African intermixing and presence in Mexico and Latin America since the African slave trade. The colonial, social and political context of the experience of race (casta system) differs from the African American experience (slavery). Sánchez examines the English and Spanish language use of negro and “nigger” by distinguishing meanings based on race and ancestry. For more information, see William Loren Katz, The Black West (Seattle: Touchstone, 1987); Quintard Taylor, In Search of the Racial Frontier: African Americans in the American West



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would have indicated a lower social ranking than the labels mulato, coyote, or chino, which identified more complex racial inter-mixings, but not as low as some categories of Indians.14 The practice of limpieza de sangre (cleansing of blood) and shifting class positions in the racial order of Spanish and Mexican Alta California provided leeway for the potential elevation of social standing.15 In the northern Spanish colonial territories, mestizos and mulatos, for instance, were able to acquire wealth and social status.16 However, the tension over symbolic racial purity remained ever-present. Site Characteristics – People and Place The racial composition of plaza residents evolved from the Mexican era into the US era. The mixed race or mestizo origins of Mexican settlers in California who were naturalized as Americans by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo complicate the distinctions among racial classification that were imported by Americans. Martha Menchaca, in Recovering History, Constructing Race, says it was the US government, in 1848, that began the process of racializing the Mexican population and assigning them different legal rights on the basis of race.17 Specifically, racialized distinctions among Mexicans afforded unequal citizenship under the law. “Mexicans who were White were given full citizenship, while mestizos, Christianized Indians, and afromestizos came under different racial laws…People of mixed European and Indian ancestry could not be enslaved, but they could be barred from voting, practicing law, or becoming naturalized citizens, and in 1528–1990 (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1998); and “Bibliographic Essay on the African American West,” Montana: The Magazine of Western History, 46.4 (1996 4): 18–21. 14. According to historian Quintard Taylor, an estimated 200,000 Africans were brought into Mexico from 1521 to 1821. “Blacks and mulattoes adopted the religion, language, foods, clothing, and lifestyles of the españoles because both European and Africans were racial minorities among a much larger Indian population.” Taylor, In Search of the Racial Frontier, 30. 15. See Michael C. Meyer and William H. Beezley, eds., The Oxford History of Mexico (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 251. “The concept of limpieza de sangre (cleanliness of blood) has been used in Spain to establish distinctions among Muslims, Jews, and Christians…The infusion of Africans and the increasing multiplicity of mixtures in the population injected a new meaning into the concept of limpieza de sangre, which applied mostly to people with either African and [sic] Jewish ancestry.” 16. Vladimir Guerrero, “Caste, Race, and Class in Spanish California,” Southern California Quarterly 92:1 (Spring 2010), 2. The last Mexican governor of California, Pío Pico, for example, was a mulato with marked racial features. 17. Martha Menchaca, Recovering History, Constructing Race: The Indian, Black, and White Roots of Mexican Americans (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002), 217.

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many states the selection of their marriage partners was restricted.”18 This meant that Mexicans who stayed to become Mexican Americans were now subject to the legal implications of racial classification in the United States. Leonard Pitt summarizes the decline of the Californios and Mexican immigrants: “California’s rapid leap into statehood, the monumental increase in its Yankee population, the alienation of [the southern California] cow counties from the north, the cataclysmic struggle over land—all operated to the political detriment of the Californios.”19 In spite of their social and political decline by the 1860s, they continued to exert economic and political power and were involved in the reshaping of the plaza area into the 1870s. In Mexican-era Los Angeles, the economic power of the ranchero families was reflected in the real and symbolic status of owning businesses and land in and around the plaza area. By the 1830s, the plaza was bordered by the adobe homes of such elite Californios (gente de razón) as Antonio Francisco Coronel, Giovanni Leandri and María Francesca Uribe, Vicente Lugo, and Ygnacio del Valle (Fig. 2).20 A deed transfer dated May 14, 1850 describes a property as “adjoining on the right hand…the houses of Don Andres Pico and Don Francisco Sepulveda on the left hand with the street commonly called ‘de los Negros’ at the rear with the backyard of the house of the deceased Don Vicente Sanchez and on the front with said main plaza.”21 Only four years later another legal property transaction refers to the street as Negro Alley. On May 24, 1854, Pío Pico and Andres Pico recorded a petition to the Mayor, Recorder, and Common Council of the City of Los Angeles to argue that for more than twelve years (i.e., dating back to 1842, in the Mexican period), they had been in possession of land and houses “thereon fronting on the northwest side of the open space or street communicating between the Plaza and the street 18. Ibid. 19. Leonard Pitt, The Decline of the Californios: A Social History of the Spanish-Speaking Californians, 1846– 1890 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1966), 131. 20. Jean Bruce Poole and Tevvy Ball, El Pueblo: The Historic Heart of Los Angeles (Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute and the J. Paul Getty Museum, 2002), 15. 21. Deed by Pio Pico to Francisca Urive [sic] wife of Don Francisco O’Campo [sic], May 14, 1850, recorded in Book A, page 919. This deed has been scanned and is online along with a book of Los Angeles city council documents through Calisphere (UC): Courtesy of Dept. of Special Collections/UCLA Library. http://www.library.ucla.edu/libraries/special/scweb/ See http://content.cdlib.org/view?docld=hb2r29n8b8&brand=calisphere Title: Abstract of title of that certain real property in the city of Los Angeles, county of Los Angeles, state of California, bounded and described as follows: the tract of land commonly known as the “Little Plaza”…



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known as Negro Alley…as is shown by the title deed extended in his favor of date the twenty-first day of August one thousand eight hundred and forty-five and which accompanies this petition.”22 These records confirm the historical name of the street as Calle de los negros. The latter document, recorded in a period in which official documents were filed in both Spanish and English, listed the street as “Negro Alley” in the English version, raising the issue of shifting meanings of the name as the city Americanized. While the meaning of Calle de los negros was not initially a racial slur nor overtly disparaging in a time and place where mulato families such as the Picos were considered gente de razón, fully accepted members of the ranchero class, freely intermarried with other members of that class, and accepted as political leaders of the province, “Negro Alley” would carry different connotations to Americans in an era when the issues of race and slavery were fundamental to a bloody civil war and a contentious reconstruction, and this may explain an 1877 account of how the street got its name. An anonymous March 24, 1877 letter to the editor of the Los Angeles Express offered an origin narrative of the street’s name. 23 The writer claims the name Calle de los negros was given to this street during the Mexican 22. Additional early use of the term “Negro Alley” occurs in the following records from the Common Council of the City of Los Angeles from the 1850s: –Ana Ma Tosto resident of the Kingdom of Sardinia by Antonio José Cot her Atty. in fact. party of the first part to Pio Pico, party of second part, Dated 2 May 1850, Deed, Recorded in Book 3 page 911 of Deeds. –Abstract of title of that certain real property in the city of Los Angeles, county of Los Angeles, state of California, bounded and described as follows: the tract of land commonly known as the “Little Plaza”… Archives V page 599, To the Mayor, Recorder and Common Council of The City of Los Angeles. Los Angeles, May 24, 1854. –Separate Property of Doña Francisca Uribe wife of Don Francisco O’Campo [sic], dated June 20 1854, Book 1 page 10. –A petition by Francisca U. de Ocampo to the Common Council. Records of Common Council, Vol. 2 Page 272, Minutes from March 26, 1855 Session.Title Insurance and Trust Company (1893–1968), March 6, 1884–January 29, 1894. Dept of Special Collections/Young Research Library, UCLA. 23. The following is the complete text from the letter to the editor of the Los Angeles Express, March 24, 1877. “One morning, when the people arose, they found a placard put up at each end of the Alley bearing the words “Calle de los Negroes” [sic]. The dwellers on the street were highly indignant, and soon traced the authorship of the placards to Don José Antonio Carrillo, and they forthwith had him cited before the Alcalde (Mayor); when he was asked what he had to say for himself, he answered that he thought the street ought to have a name; that it would be invidious to name it for any particular one living on the street, as they were all Negros alike; that the name of the street was an appropriate one, and in proof of his assertion offered in evidence the complexion of the complainants then before the Alcalde. The complaint was dismissed, but the name then given has stuck until the present time.”

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era because the alcalde (mayor) agreed with the opinion of plaza resident Don José Antonio Carrillo, who first named the street because its residents were reportedly all dark-skinned mulattoes. Carrillo, a brotherin-law of Pío and Andres Pico, became an economically and politically powerful Californio during the Mexican era and into the US period. He was an official delegate to the 1849 California constitutional convention, where he was the only Californio delegate who voted for the admission of free Negroes into the state. The residents on Calle de los negros, in this account, rejected the connotation of racial “others” in Carrillo’s street naming and challenged him in court. The letter’s narrative ends by saying that the judge found the racialized naming of the street justified.24 The name of the street embodied an ambiguous cultural legacy of racialization from the Mexican era by this account; it would translate into a clearly racist label in the American period. Negro Alley, 1856-1870s Race & Name: A Street Name in Translation The cultural baggage of new American settlers offers one explanation for the derogatory connotations of the street’s name. The evolution of the use and meaning of the term Negro Alley is directly informed by the influx of new Anglo settlers who were unaccustomed to the multi-racial communities unique to southern California and the growing US Southwest between the 1850s and 1870s. Racial formation provides a focus on the social, political, and economic dynamics that would define racial categories and their meanings in California during the mid-to-late nineteenth century. Tomás Almaguer explains, “For various sectors of the EuropeanAmerican population, located at different levels within the emergent class structure, racializing discourses and practices served as mechanisms to create, extend, or preserve their social position in the period during which white supremacy was being systematically institutionalized.”25 In 1856, the Los Angeles City Council contracted Aldolphus F. Waldemar to conduct the first professional survey specifically of the Los Angeles plaza.26 Waldemar’s map translated the former Calle de los negros into English as “Negro Alley.” One month after the Waldemar 24. Pitt, The Decline of the Californios, 45. 25. Tomás Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines: The Historical Origins of White Supremacy in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 3. 26. Robinson, Maps of Los Angeles, 100-102, Map 9, by Waldemar, 1856.



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map was completed, the mayor and Common Council of the City of Los Angeles passed an ordinance establishing the boundaries of the Main Plaza, and the name Negro Alley became part of the official nomenclature of the city.27 While Waldemar and the council could have translated the name to Black Alley, referring only to a color, the term “Negro” in contemporary American parlance referred strictly to race, and Americans had distinct attitudes about the African race developed through two and a half centuries of slavery and a brewing Civil War. “Negro Alley” was a derogatory term in this context. A Site Regarded as Physically, Morally, and Racially Disorderly Another reason for the shift in attitude toward the street was its changing usage and occupancy. Although ownership of land parcels in the plaza area was retained by some of the old families, the area declined as the city center shifted southward. Historian Leonard Pitt describes the landscape of the 1850s plaza area as “altogether anticlimactic” as “roadways seemed to grope aimlessly through town looking for an exit to the nearby valleys, where other people lived who considered themselves Angelenos.”28 The buildings were largely adobe and set at various angles to each other and the street. The residents and activities on the street were likewise disorderly. Based on the drawings from the 1853 United States Pacific Rail Road Exploration and Survey of Los Angeles, Ana Begue de Packman and Ruth Saunders created a descriptive numbered map of the 1853 Plaza area (Fig. 2).29 She identified few names, but an 1873 surveyor’s map (Fig. 3) listed twelve property owners (not necessarily occupants), all of them with Spanish names and most of them recognizable as Californio families.30 Contrary to some historians’ claims, my research has found no evidence of an African American presence on Calle de los negros or later Negro Alley in nineteenth-century records dating back to the 1850s.31 27. “An Ordinance Establishing the Lines of the Public Squares,” El Clamor Público, January 10, 1857, Vol. II, No. 28, 3, col.2. 28. Pitt, The Decline of the Californios, 121. 29. Begue de Packman, “Landmarks and Pioneers of Los Angeles,” 76. 30. Named on this map, with dates in the 1850s, are: José del Carmen Sepulveda, José Vicente Guerrero, Serafina Uribe, Juan Apaplasa, María Figaroa [sic], María Ballestero, Vicente Lugo, Ascención Navarro, Ascención Joalua, Juan…Sepulveda, S… Sanchez, and Andres Pico. “Map of the Old Portion of the City surrounding the Plaza…, March 12, 1873. A. G. Ruxton, Surveyor.” Solano Reeve Collection, Los Angeles Public Library. 31. William Estrada, in his history of the plaza, identifies eighteenth-century pobladores (settlers) who

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Historians William Mason and Jeanne Duque identified the various types of businesses that operated on Negro Alley before the Chinese became the dominant residents. Charles Borroughs, William Corbett, the partnership of Gaylord and Tibbetts, and one Nelson were…in business there during the early 1850s. These men had livery stables, saloons, and a restaurant (Nelson’s Opera Restaurant). A pawnshop, butcher shop, grocery store, and a barber shop were other businesses in Negro Alley... One of the more cultural pursuits to be found in Negro Alley was the theater. On the east side of the alley was the house of Vicente Guerrero, where his son, Rafael, put on Spanish-language plays.32

This ragged dirt byway, tinged by Americans’ racial prejudices and nuisance enterprises (livery stables due to flies and odors; a pawn shop for the needy, desperate, and sometimes criminal clientele), was not only the site of a saloon, a theater, and a theater-linked restaurant but a place more directly associated with vice. Ana Begue de Packman describes a historical character associated with Calle de los negros in 1853 and a building on the street both known as La Prietita. Packman conflates the description of a house of prostitution and designates a namesake, La Prieta (“little dark woman”), as racially fitting for residency on the street called Calle de los negros. The woman, “La Prietita, striking in her finery, flaunted her disgrace to the Angelenos by setting up a house of prostitution within these adobe walls. La Calle de los negros, like the heart of its shameful queen, ‘La Prieta,’ was the blackest spot of the Pueblo.”33 According to a recent archaeowere mulatos, and mentions mulato members of the Californio elite, such as Pío and Andrés Pico, in the Mexican era who owned property in the plaza area into the US period. But while he does find notable African Americans of the American period located downtown, such as Peter Biggs, a barber whose shop was on Main Street, Darnell Hunt and Ana-Christina Ramón, with no specific evidence, go a step further to state that African Americans moved into Negro Alley. The African American population of Los Angeles remained small until the early 1900s when the previously small community clusters began to expand. The US Census of 1850 noted only fifteen black residents in the County of Los Angeles. The census numbers show the black population of Los Angeles at 1,817 in 1900, rising to 9,424 by 1910. Josh Sides notes that the first identifiable black community in Los Angeles was located downtown off First and Los Angeles Street around 1887. Calle de los negros was located one-quarter of a mile northeast of this site. Estrada, The Los Angeles Plaza, 62–72; Darnell Hunt and Ana-Christina Ramón, eds., Black Los Angeles: American Dreams and Racial Realities (New York: New York University Press, 2010), 23, 32–33, 35; US Census Bureau, Seventh Census of the United States, 1850; US Census Bureau, Twelfth Census of the United States, 1900; US Census Bureau, Thirteenth Census of the United States, 1910; Josh Sides, L.A. City Limits: African American Los Angeles from the Great Depression to the Present (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 13–17. 32. William Mason, “The Chinese in Los Angeles,” Los Angeles Museum of Natural History Quarterly 6 (Fall 1967), 15–20. 33. Begue de Packman, “Landmarks and Pioneers,” 76.



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logical study, there were an estimated twenty prostitutes in the city in 1853.34 The following year, “a troop of ‘lewd women’ from San Francisco” arrived in the city and this marked the expansion of the prostitution zone adjacent to the plaza.35 Historian J. M. Guinn, writing in 1896, related the name of the street with the reputation it had earned since the 1850s. Whether its ill-omened name was given to it from the darkness of the deeds done upon it, I do not know. In the flush days of gold mining, from 1850 to 1856, it was the wickedest street on earth…In length it did not exceed 500 feet, but in wickedness, it was unlimited. On either side it was lined with saloons, gambling hells, dance houses and disreputable dives. It was a cosmopolitan street. Representatives of different races and many nations frequented it. Here the ignoble red man, crazed with aguardiente, fought his battles, the swarthy Sonorian plied his stealthy dagger, and the click of the revolver mingled with the clink of gold at the gaming table when some chivalric American felt that his word of “honah” had been impugned.36

Writing about the entire period of the 1850s through the 1880s, Douglas Monroy describes “Nigger Alley” as “a place of destitution, vice, violence, and mayhem.”37 By 1871, Negro Alley was notorious as a racially, spatially, and morally disorderly place. It was here that a growing number of Chinese immigrants settled. Chinese immigration to California began in earnest in the 1850s with the draw of the gold rush and the opportunities for labor on the railroads. After the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869, many Chinese began to migrate into West Coast cities to find work. In the mining regions, along the railroad districts, and in San Francisco in the 1850s and 1860s, the Chinese were the targets of discriminatory legislation, acts of intimidation, and violence.38 As they began to move into Los Angeles in those decades, these harassed people settled in the place of least resistance, the neighborhood Packman labeled “the wickedest” in town, 34. Julia G. Costello, “’A Night with Venus, a Moon with Mercury’: The Archaeology of Prostitution in Historic Los Angeles,” in Restoring Women’s History through Historic Preservation, ed. Gail Lee Dubrow and Jennifer B. Goodman (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 180. 35. Ibid. 36. J.M. Guinn, “Old Los Angeles,” The Los Angeles Times, March 23, 1896, 9. 37. Douglas Monroy, Rebirth: Mexican Los Angeles from the Great Migration to the Great Depression (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999), 18. 38. Charles J. McClain, In Search of Equality: The Chinese Struggle against Discrimination in NineteenthCentury America (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994), 9–29.

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and established a racial enclave. There, William Estrada notes, the “Chinese of Los Angeles came to fill an important sector of the economy as entrepreneurs. Some became proprietors and employees of small hand laundries and restaurants; some were farmers and wholesale produce peddlers; others ran gambling establishments; and some occupied other areas left vacant by the absence of workers in the gold rush migration to California.”39 The Los Angeles Chinese community grew from fourteen in 1860 to nearly two hundred by 1870.40 Guinn, in 1896, asserted that Calle de los negros maintained its “wickedness” when it changed from just a nuisance district to the city’s Chinatown sector: The Calle de Los Negros was the central point from which the wickedness of the city radiated; but its morals were not improved by the [demographic] change. It ceased to be the rendezvous of the gambler and the desperado and became the center of the Chinese quarter of the city. [Thomas] Carlyle says the eighteenth century blew its brains out in the French Revolution. Nigger Alley might be said to have blown its brains out, if it had any, in the Chinese massacre of 1871.41

A Violent Attack on a Disorderly Zone and Efforts to Impose Order There In the course of one night, October 24, 1871, lynching, mayhem, shooting, and looting resulted in property loss, a number of injuries, and the deaths of at least eighteen Chinese. (See above, pp. 25-26) The histories written about the Chinese massacre usually begin by framing the events leading up to the massacre as a Chinese community disagreement (between rival associations or tongs Hong Chow and Nin Yung) over a Chinese woman (Ya Hit), a dispute which spilled over into the streets of Chinatown and ended in mob violence targeting the Chinese population.42 According to historian C. P. Dorland’s 1894 account,43 the events of the massacre started with gunfire around 39. Estrada, The Los Angeles Plaza, 72. 40. Ibid. 41. Guinn, “Old Los Angeles,” 9. 42. Tongs were part of life in Chinatowns going back to the 1850s. “Originally underground anti-government movements in the homeland, the tongs served a particular need in Chinese America.” Ronald Takaki, A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America (Boston: Little Brown & Co, 1993), 216. 43. C.P. Dorland, “Chinese Massacre at Los Angeles in 1871,” Historical Society of Southern California (1894): 22.



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the plaza area and Negro Alley. Police officers were unable to quell the disturbance, armed citizens entered the fray, and a free-for-all of looting and lynching ensued.44 Scholar Scott Zesch’s recent historical study, based on English-language newspapers and court records, provides a detailed depiction of the Chinese in Los Angeles along with a renewed and expanded focus on the details of the massacre.45 According to later newspaper coverage of courtroom testimony about the massacre, many of the eyewitnesses were listed as Caucasian or Mexican. One eyewitness stated that he “saw the hanging, but could not name any of the parties engaged…One of them he thought to be a Mexican.”46 Witnesses also testified that participants gave commands in English and Spanish to quell the violence. “Gen. J.M. Baldwin sworn, testified that he went down to the neighborhood of Negro Alley…he addressed the crowd…and exhorted them to desist in their atrocious work; spoke in Spanish; his speech was translated to the English speaking portion of the mob by one whom I recognized to be a Mr. Hicks”(original emphasis).47 Based on the testimony, it is evident that Californios, Mexican immigrants, and Anglos were all involved in mob violence against the Chinese. In this mob riot, the class and racial allegiances of the rioters—whether Mexican or Caucasian—mattered less than the Chinese identity of the victims. The acts of violence highlighted the Chinese as racially targeted scapegoats. In two court actions stemming from the 1871 Chinese Massacre, the California Supreme Court affirmed the findings of the city authorities that the Los Angeles Common Council was not liable for compensating the Chinese merchants (the plaintiffs) whose private property was lost.48 Moreover, in spite of the court’s decision in the related case of People v. McGuire that after January 1, 1873, no witnesses could be excluded from any case on the basis of nationality or color, the 1874 44. Ibid., 23. 45. Scott Zesch, “Chinese Los Angeles in 1870–1871: The Makings of a Massacre,” Southern California Quarterly, 90:2 (Summer 2008): 136–142. 46. Los Angeles Daily News, October 26, 1871. 47. Ibid. 48. California Supreme Court Report, Volume 47, 1874, 535. The Court based its ruling on two central points: first, the plaintiffs “made no effort to notify the Mayor and second, at least one of them instigated and participated in the riot.” This was upheld in an 1874 court report in spite of the testimony of three witnesses (Sanchez, Gard, and Harris) who stated that “during the progress of the riot it was unsafe for a Chinaman to be seen on the street.”

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California Supreme Court report mentions no Chinese testimony in the cases regarding the massacre.49 In Los Angeles, an 1872 grand jury blamed the outbreak of the violence on an internecine feud among the Chinese, but concluded: We believe we should be wanting in our duty if we should fail to present to this Court the painful conclusion to which we are forced, that the officers of this county as well as this city, whose duty it is to preserve the peace and to arrest those who are violating the law, were deplorably inefficient in the performance of their duty during the scenes of confusion and bloodshed which disgraced our city, and [this] has cast a reproach upon the people of Los Angeles County…Had these officers performed this duty, this grand jury would not have been called upon to devote weeks to the investigation of the matter, nor would there have been any riotous acts on that night to stain the records of this County.50

The grand jury findings center on the “deplorably inefficient” performance of the county officers and city officials with regard to control of the violence before it escalated into mob violence, indicating a lack of diligence in protecting Chinese residents. But notice also that the failure by the county and city was not measured by the deaths of Chinese residents but by the “stain” the rioters’ acts had left on the city. The historical narrative about the massacre constructed in the late nineteenth century emphasizes the death of a police officer rather than Chinese suffering and neither the press nor the courts attempted to correct the ambiguity over how many Chinese were killed, with accounts varying from eighteen to twenty-two. The 1892 edition of the Los Angeles City Directory includes a “History of Los Angeles City” that devotes one sentence to the Chinese massacre: “A riot occurred October 24, 1871, in which eighteen Chinamen were killed.” This is mentioned in between a sentence on the first telegraph message being received in Los Angeles and the arrival of the first railroads.51 To this day, no plaque commemorates the site of the massacre.52 While law enforcement, the courts, and historians engaged in forgetting the massacre, the Chinese remembered. One year later, the ancient Chiao ritual (similar to a sacrificial mass) was celebrated by the Los Angeles Chinese community to collectively remember and 49. See California Supreme Court Report, Volume 45, 1874, 56. 50. Criminal Record of Los Angeles County, “The People v. L.T. Crenshaw, et al.,” 1872. 51. Los Angeles City and County Directory (Los Angeles: W.H.L. Corran, 1892), 19–20. 52. Victor Jew, “The Anti-Chinese Massacre of 1871 and Its Strange Career,” in A Companion to Los Angeles, ed. William Deverell and Greg Hise (Chichester, Sussex, UK and Malden, MA: WileyBlackwell, 2010), 123.



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renew the life of the people (and the city) in the aftermath of the massacre. The Chiao ritual became one way in which the Chinese community was renewed and sustained on the plaza area. The ceremony expressed cultural resistance and served to restore order to the social and cultural life of the city. Organizers openly invited the public at large to attend and participate in the event, which lasted four nights and three days.53 The ceremony, which was performed every third year until 1908, publicly remembered Chinese losses in order to reclaim a sense of place on the plaza. As the center of the Chinese community on the plaza was being reshaped and fought over by property owners and the city council, the Chinese community was consciously orchestrating a restoration of order on Calle de los negros, Nigger Alley.54 An 1873 surveyor, A. G. Ruxton, found the plaza area more orderly in terms of permanence and physical features than the violence, the faulty law enforcement, and Anglo descriptions of wickedness implied. While odd angles and uneven facades are apparent on his map (Fig. 3), historic names such as Sepulveda, Lugo, Del Valle, and Pico are designated as long-time property owners and the central plaza is neatly bordered by a fence and is crossed by designated footpaths. Disorder was a subjective perception. The years that followed the massacre witnessed a persistent sequence of attempts not only to erase the memory of Negro Alley but to eliminate the place and people as well. Repeatedly, the city council attempted to secure private property on Nigger Alley to be used for the extension of Los Angeles Street through the Chinatown section of the plaza area. Property owners challenged these efforts beginning in 1872, when the property owners in the Negro Alley area of the plaza won a favorable recommendation by the city committee on land, stating that “said property be not sold or interfered with by the City, but that it 53. César López, “El Descanso: A Comparative History of the Los Angeles Plaza Area and the Shared Racialized Space of the Mexican and Chinese Communities, 1853–1933” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2002), 94. 54. For more information on the Los Angeles Chinese community’s efforts to build a new Chinatown see a series of essays and oral histories at The Chinatown Remembered Project by the Chinese Historical Society of Southern California (http://www.chinatownremembered.com/), an online archive created in 2008 by the Chinese Historical Society of Southern California. The Chinatown Remembered Project tells the story of this generation of Chinese Americans from Los Angeles who came of age of during the Great Depression, who served their country during World War II, and who, through the creation of clubs and other extra-curricular activities, forged an identity quite distinct from that of their immigrant parents. While the 1930s and 1940s were decades of change for all Americans, for many local Chinese American youth, this period proved to be the zeitgeist that defined their generation.

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Fig. 3. An 1873 survey of the heart of Los Angeles recorded odd street angles and uneven façade lines but indicated that the central plaza was neatly bordered by a fence and was crossed by designated footpaths. Historic names such as Sepúlveda, Lugo, Del Valle, and Pico appear on the survey map as long-time property owners. “Map of the Old Portion of the City surrounding the Plaza, Showing the Old Plaza Church, Public Square, the First Gas Plant and Adobe Buildings, Los Angeles City, 1873. A. G. Ruxton, surveyor” Solano Reeve Collection. Courtesy of the Los Angeles Public Library.



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remain as it is.”55 The land committee explained that disposing of the land fronting Negro Alley and fronting on the adjacent private property “would injure the adjoining proprietors, who have had undoubted privileges upon said land for more than fifty years, at the same time it would involve the City in litigation and expense.”56 The common council records noted Pío Pico, Tomás A. Sanchez, Ramona de Sepúlveda and Francisco Sepúlveda, and Francisca Uribe de O’Campo (Ocampo) as owners of land that would be directly impacted. Pico and other landowners on the plaza were taken to court by the mayor and city council on November 3, 1875 in another effort to gain the legal right-of-way to expand and open Los Angeles Street over their land.57 In 1877, the Los Angeles City Council approved a resolution to change the name of Negro Alley to North Los Angeles Street as part of a long-term effort to incorporate the alley into an extension of Los Angeles Street.58 The official name change did not affect popular usage apparently, as the local newspapers continued to refer to the location as Negro Alley or Nigger Alley or, rarely, Calle de los negros (Table I). 55. Common Council Records Vol. VII–482, Minutes of Session of March 7, 1872; Title Insurance and Trust Company (1893–1968), March 6, 1884–January 29, 1894. Dept. of Special Collections/Young Research Library, UCLA. 56. Ibid. 57. In the County Court STATE OF CALIFORNIA, In and for the County of Los Angeles. The Mayor and Common Council of The City of Los Angeles Plaintiff vs. Antonio F. Coronel, Pio Pico et al. Defendants. NOTICE OF ACTION. Recorded 3rd day of Nov 1875 at 1:50 P.M. Book / Page 316. Notices of Action. Object of Action. To condemes [sic] the right of way over and along the strip of land hereinafter particularly described for the laying out and extending Los Angeles Street over and along the same for use by the public as a street. Property Affected: All that real property in the City of Los Angeles County of Los Angeles, State of California,bounded and described as follows, to-wit: Commencing at a point in the north line of Arcadia Street when a point in the west line of Los Angeles Street prolonged N 38⅛° & 1062⅔ feet to a point in the west line of Alameda Street. Thence along the west line of Alameda Street S 10¾° W 172 feet to a point. Thence S 38⅛° W 627 5/6 feet to a point in the N. line of an adobe building owned by previous hit Pio Pico, Thence S 62½° E 15 feet to a point in the West line of Negro next hit Alley. Thence along the West line of Negro Alley S 33½° W. 120 feet to a point. Thence along said West line S 34½° W 150 feet to a point. The S.E. corner of a lot owned by A.F. Coronel. Thence W 56¾° W 116 feet to the point of beginning. NOTE. From the records and papers on file in the action of which the foregoing notice was given (case no. 712 upon the Register of actions of the County Court) it appears that said action was dismissed 22d June 1877 at request of attorney for Plaintiff. Title Insurance and Trust Company (1893–1968), March 6, 1884–January 29, 1894 Dept. of Special Collections/Young Research Library, UCLA. 58. David S. Torres-Rouff, “Making Los Angeles: Race, Space, and Municipal Power, 1822-1890,” (PhD diss., University of California, Santa Barbara, 2006), 299. Torres-Rouff notes that on the city council document in the official Los Angeles City Archive from March 22, 1877, vol. 12, 647–649, the words Nigger Alley were scratched out and the words Negro Alley were written above the original resolution text. It is unknown when this change was made on the original text.

Source Ana Ma Tosto resident of the Kingdom of Sardinia by Antonio José Cot her Atty. in fact. party of the first part to Pio Pico party of second part, Deed, Recorded in Book 3 page 911 of Deeds, Common Council, City of Los Angeles May 14, 1850 Deed by “Pio Pico to Francisca Urive(sic) wife of Don Francisco O’Campo” recorded in Book A page 919. May 24, 1854 “Little Plaza” abstract of title for property on the plaza, Municipal Records relation to Pico Lot, Archives V page 599, Common Council, City of Los Angeles June 20, 1854 Separate Property of Doña Francisca Uribe wife of Don Francisco O’Campo, dated June 20 1854, Book 1 page 10. March 25, 1855 Records of Common Council, Vol. 2 Page 272, Minutes of Session of 26 December 1, 1856 “Plaza in Los Angeles City,” map by Adolphus F. Waldemar October 26, 1871 Los Angeles Daily News March 7, 1872 “Common Council Records, Vol. VII-482, Minutes of Session” City of Los Angeles, California March 12, 1873 “Map of the Old Portion of the City” map by A.G. Ruxton [Fig. 2] November 3, 1875 Notice of Action, “The Mayor and Common Council of the City of Los Angeles v. Antonio F. Coronel, Pio Pico, et al, LA County Court record March 22, 1877 Resolution, Los Angeles City Council, Vol. 12, 647-9 March 24, 1877 Los Angeles Express 1886 Los Angeles City Directory 1887 Los Angeles City Directory 1888 Sanborn map, Vol. 1, Sheet 12a September 1, 1888 “Nigger Alley,” Los Angeles Times May 23, 1889 Los Angeles Times 1890 Los Angeles City Directory

Date May 2, 1850

TABLE I: The Changing Names of Calle de los Negros

North Los Angeles Street Calle de los negros Nigger Alley Negro Alley North Los Angeles Street Nigger Alley Negro Alley Negro Alley

Calle de los negros Negro Alley

Negro Alley Negro Alley Negro Alley

Negro Alley

Negro Alley

Negro Alley

Calle “de los Negros”

Name Negro Alley

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Nigger Alley Nigger Alley North Los Angeles Street (Negro Alley) Nigger Alley (Also known as Los Angeles St.) North Los Angeles Street (Negro Alley) Arcadia Street Negro Alley Calle de los negros

Los Angeles City Directory Sanborn map, Vol. 3, Sheet 301 Los Angeles 1910 Baist’s Real Estate Surveys

Los Angeles City Directory

Los Angeles 1921 Baist’s Real Estate Surveys

Sanborn map, vol 3, sheet 301 Los Angeles Pocket Atlas “Landmarks and Pioneers of LA in 1853” by Ana Begue de Packman in HSSCQ article Sanborn map, Vol. 3, Sheet 301

Sanborn map, Vol. 3, Sheet 301

“El Pueblo de Los Angeles S.H.P. Plaza Area in 1870” map in General Plan

1911-1918

1921

1934 1943 1944

1955

1980

No listing for any version of the name; site of freeway onramp No listing for any version of the name; site of freeway onramp Negro Alley as historical name

Negro Alley

Los Angeles Times

1950

Nigger Alley Nigger Alley Negro Alley Negro Alley Calle de los negros Nigger Alley

Sanborn map, Vol. 1, Sheet 14b “Chinese Massacre at Los Angeles in 1871” by C.P. Dorland in HSSC Los Angeles Times Los Angeles Times Article by J.M. Guinn in Los Angeles Times Los Angeles Times

1894 1894 March 19, 1896 August 14, 1896 1896 September 21, 1898 December 13, 1900 1901-1909 1906 1910

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Nigger Alley and North Los Angeles Street, 1880s–1900s Multiple Names The Chinese community contributed in its own way to recognizing their racialized place by translating Negro Alley into Chinese characters that phonetically sounded out the street name. References to Negro Alley are found in Chinese-language business directories in 1882 and 1913.59 In these Chinese business directories, the actual translation was crafted into phonetic sounds which when combined, sounded like the word negro (the translation for the word alley meant “side street” in Chinese). Successive issues of the annual Los Angeles City Directory track the different incarnations by which the original Calle de los negros was known to the general public, in sections listing every street name followed by descriptions of location—Nigger Alley (1886), Negro Alley (1887–1890) and then again, Nigger Alley (1901–1918) (Table II, pp. 66–90). In 1886, Negro Alley was identified in the Los Angeles City Directory as “Nigger Alley (Chinatown), bet[ween] Alameda and Main, running N[orth] from Arcadia to Plaza.”60 In this issue of the directory, neither the terms Negro Alley nor Calle de los negros were listed. One year later, a new publisher, W.H.L. Corran, published a revised edition of the directory. In its preface he indicates the work required to create a modern directory.61 This edition referred to the short street as “Negro Alley, f[ro]m Arcadia to Plaza bet[ween] North Main and North Alameda,” as did the 1890 edition.62 In the street descriptions in the directories between 1891 and 1900, neither Negro Alley nor Nigger Alley are listed in the street identification section. An 1897 Los Angeles Times news brief noted that the directory for that year had omitted business names and several streets in Chinatown: “the buildings on North Los Angeles and Alameda street…are labeled merely ‘Chinese,’ and Apablasa [and] Nigger Alley, Juan street and other byways given over wholly to the Mongolians are not even 59. Wells Fargo Express: Directory of Chinese Business, 1882, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley; International Chinese Business Directory of the World, San Francisco, California, 1913. 60. Los Angeles City and County Directory (Los Angeles: A.A. Bynon & Co., 1886), 87. “Nigger Alley (Chinatown), bet Alameda and Main, running N from Arcadia to Plaza.” 61. Los Angeles City and County Directory, (Los Angeles: W.H.L. Corran, Publisher and Printer, 1887). 62. Ibid., 69.



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Fig. 4. In this photograph of Negro Alley or “Nigger Alley,” looking north about 1882, the old adobe on the left is visibly dilapidated. Many wagons are parked in front of the row of businesses on the right. In the foreground, a pedestrian in traditional Chinese garb precedes a wagon headed for the junction with Los Angeles Street. Courtesy of the University of Southern California Libraries, Title Insurance and Trust/ C.C. Pierce Photography Collection.

mentioned in the book.”63 It is not until 1901 that the alley is listed again in a city directory, this time as “Nigger Alley. North from Arcadia blk east of N. Los Angeles,” terminology that continued in the annual directories through 1918.64 Merely erasing the name, however, did not change the place, which continued to exist Site Characteristics: A Racialized Conflation of Demographics, Businesses, Vice, and Racial Others Between the 1880s and 1890s, Los Angles saw an increase in the Chinese population that came to form the Chinatown area of the plaza. According to the United States Census, the Chinese population in Los Angles grew from 11 (1860) to 234 (1870), increasing to 1,169 (1880), and reaching 4,424 (1890). The 1888 Sanborn Fire Insurance Map (Fig. 5) identifies “Chinese Quarters,” and businesses labeled “Chinese goods,” “drugs,” and several “Chinese Gaming” establishments on the east side of Nigger Alley and unidentified structures jointly labeled “Chinatown” on the west side. In the interior of the block 63. “All Along The Line,” Los Angeles Times, June 9, 1897, 7. 64. Los Angeles City and County Directory (Los Angeles: W.H.L. Corran, Publisher and Printer, 1901), 1113.

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Fig. 5. This map shows Los Angeles Street connecting with the Plaza area. Neither Calle de los negros, Negro Alley, or Nigger Alley is listed on this map. The 1888 Sanborn Fire Insurance Map labels the zig-zag connection between Los Angeles Street and the plaza, known locally as Negro or “Nigger” Ally, as “Los Angeles Street.” The map identifies “Chinese Quarters,” and businesses labeled “Chinese goods,” “drugs,” and several “Chinese Gaming” establishments on the east (lower) side of the alley and unidentified structures jointly labeled “Chinatown” on the west side. In the interior of the block and facing Alameda were rows of “female boarding” and “sleeping rooms,” the polite terms for brothels and prostitution cribs. Prostitution and other vices are reported as part of the daily activities in this section of the plaza during the 1880s and 1890s with much of this traffic controlled and worked by white women. The proximity of social vice and a discriminated race made the district seem doubly disorderly to civic officials. 1888 Sanborn Map of Los Angeles, CA (Vol.1, Sheet 12a). Courtesy of the Geography Map Library, California State University, Northridge.



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and facing Alameda were rows of “female boarding” and “sleeping rooms,” the euphemisms for brothels and prostitution cribs. Prostitution and other vices are reported as part of the daily activities in this section of the plaza during the 1880s and 1890s with many of the prostitution cribs being controlled and worked by white women, although one 1897 advertisement touted “Southern beauties of the Octoroon type.”65 The social vice of prostitution (which in this case included white women as “others”) was conflated with the racialized social status of the Chinatown area of the plaza. Each of these descriptions provides generalizations about the people who lived on and frequented the street. By 1900, the Los Angeles City Directory provided a detailed listing of names of residents and businesses on Nigger Alley (Table II, pp. 66–90). In its two short blocks, all but one of the property occupants were Chinese: one individual Chinese name (apparently a residence), five properties just identified as “Chinese” (presumably residences), ten Chinese businesses (one identified as “meat,” the wares of the others not identified), and one non-Chinese business—Bartolo Ballerino’s restaurant—on the east side of the street.66 Known as the “crib king,” Ballerino was infamous for controlling a large portion of the prostitution cribs in Chinatown during the 1890s.67 Whether some of the Chinese businesses were still gambling dens in 1900 or not, the proximity of Ballerino and the brothels made it easy for the general public to link the Chinese in the area to the vice district as racialized terrain throughout the 1880s and 1900s. The narrative of racial and moral disorder became a normal association for the derogatively designated Nigger Alley. Eliminating Disorder From the 1870s to the 1910s, Angelenos privately and through the actions of local government sought ways to regulate and exclude the Chinese community. The Chinese experienced repeated acts 65. Ibid., 181–185. Roberta S. Greenwood, et al, Down by the Station: Los Angeles Chinatown, 1880–1933. Monumenta Archaeologica 18 (Los Angeles: Institute of Archaeology, University of California, Los Angeles, 1996), 20. 66. Los Angeles City and County Directory (1901), 1113. This edition identifies the street as: “Nigger Alley. North from Arcadia ½ blk east of N. Los Angeles,” and identifies occupants by house number. See Table II. 67. “Obituary for Bartolo Ballerino,” Los Angeles Times, July 12, 1909.

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of private violence and harassment, including arson. The shape of the space once known as Calle de los negros was pummeled into new forms by eminent domain, efforts at extending and widening North Los Angeles Street, law suits, and the buildings that property owners erected along the alley’s unstable borders. Through all this, a Chinatown persisted on and around Negro Alley. Along with legal actions of expulsion directed at the Chinese by the local city council and reinforced by the national Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 (regularly renewed until it was made permanent in 1902)68 and discriminatory state laws,69 vigilante violence took aim at Chinatowns across the United States. Setting fire to Chinatown occurred regularly in Los Angeles in the late 1880s. There were reported attempts to burn down Chinatown on October 24, 1886; June 25, 1887; July 24, 1887; and October 10, 1887.70 In 1887, the city was ready to acquire properties on Nigger Alley for the purpose of extending North Los Angeles as a straight thoroughfare. The city council authorized the city attorney to enter into an agreement to purchase the single-story property of real-estate investor Mrs. L. M. Bigelow on Nigger Alley for $12,000 and for the city 68. The 1882 exclusion act followed a federal court decision barring Chinese immigrants from citizenship. The Federal Circuit Court in San Francisco ruled that Chinese were ineligible for naturalization (Ah Yup, 1 F. Cas. 223 (C.C.D. Cal 1878); 22 Stat. 58 (1882). The Chinese Exclusion Act expressly forbid any court, state or federal, from granting citizenship to any Chinese person. 69. 1862 Cal. Stat. 462: An Act to Protect Free White Labor against Competition with Chinese Coolie Labor, and to Discourage the Immigration of Chinese...into California: All Chinese people not employed in growing tea, rice, coffee or sugar must pay a $2.50 license fee each month. (Declared unconstitutional in Lin Sing v. Washburn, 20 Cal. 534 (1862)). 1870 Cal Stat 330: “Mongolian” women emigrating to California must prove that they are of good character. 1891 Cal Stat 185: “The coming of Chinese persons into the State, whether subjects of the Chinese Empire or otherwise,” is prohibited. (Declared unconstitutional in Ex Parte: Ah Cue, 101 Cal. 197 (1894)). Chuck Marcus. “All Persons Born or Naturalized ...The Legacy of US v. Wong Kim Ark, UC Hastings College of the Law Library, http://traynor.uchastings.edu/library/Library%20Collections/ Displays/wkadisplay/index.htm Torres-Rouff, “Making Los Angeles,” 304–308, examines the use of the California State Legislature’s 1880 “An Act to Provide for the Removal of Chinese Whose Presence is Dangerous to the Well Being of Communities” by the Los Angeles City Council in an effort to open Los Angeles Street and remove the Chinese. 70. “Chinatown Scorched,” Los Angeles Times, October 24, 1886, 1. “Vigilantes?: A Startling Attempt to Burn Chinatown,” Los Angeles Times, June 25, 1887, 1. “Fire: Chinatown Swept By an Incendiary Blaze,” Los Angeles Times, July 24, 1887, 8. “High-Binders: A Fire and a Bloody Riot in Chinatown,” Los Angeles Times, October 10, 1887, 1. “Another Fire in Chinatown,” Los Angeles Herald, October 10, 1887, 3.



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to abandon Nigger Alley as a public highway.71 On January 10, 1888, former city councilman and chairman of the Board of Public Works Jacob Kurhts was appointed the new Superintendent of Streets. He began working on the immediate goal of opening and extending Los Angeles Street as part of a public strategy for the long-term removal of Chinatown from the plaza area. He was asked about this specific task and was clear about his goals. “Yes, I am glad to inform you that I attack the great mogul tomorrow. We are about to extend Los Angeles street, and I will tear down all that part of the long, festering rookery that stands in the way. I would like to tear down every vestige of it; but, with the central portion rooted out, and Los Angeles Street cut through and built up, Chinatown will speedily disappear.”72 The city’s strategy of displacing the Chinese and reforming the geographically-concentrated vice district by opening up Los Angeles Street was now actively proceeding; however, the property owners on Nigger Alley did not all agree on the terms for this opening. For some it offered an opportunity to expand their properties, as Kurhts, when asked about the future of Nigger Alley, declared, “The city having moved the street from them, they acquire the right to move their property up to the new line or to build new property on that line.”73 Kurhts was determined to begin the demolition of obstacles for opening up Los Angeles Street. Years later he reflected on his methods for doing this in an essay entitled “Reminiscences of a Pioneer” published in the Annual Publication of the Historical Society of Southern California and the Tenth Annual Publication of the Pioneers of Los Angeles County, 1906. “I hired about a hundred men, and on a certain morning had them on the ground by four o’clock with battering rams and other instruments, and by ten o’clock in the morning, I had razed nearly every building between Arcadia Street and the Plaza, when an injunction was filed upon me by Col. G. Wiley Wells [Mrs. Bigelow’s attorney]. But the mischief was done, and Los Angeles Street was opened as it is today.”74 The demolished buildings 71. “Council,” Los Angeles Times, December 7, 1887, 6. 72. “Street Work: The Superintendent of Streets Will Remove Chinatown,” Los Angeles Times, January 10, 1888, 1. 73. Ibid. 74. “Reminiscences of a Pioneer,” in the Annual Publication of the Historical Society of Southern California and the Tenth Annual Publication of the Pioneers of Los Angeles County 1906 (Los Angeles, California, 1907), 67–68.

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were all identified as part of Chinatown and included the specific listings of some single-family-units (most with tile chimneys) and many buildings occupied by stores on the first floors. In the aftermath of the street superintendent’s audacious action, the property owners asserted their right to reshape the area. In 1888, property owners on Nigger Alley organized and succeeded in pressuring the mayor not to approve the city ordinance to close Nigger Alley. On February 1st, a letter to the editor from Ballerino was published in the Los Angeles Herald where he argued that “‘Nigger Ally’ [sic] is ‘Los Angeles’ street, made so by resolution of the Council, March 22, 1887. Hence it is, that by straitening [sic] and widening the said street, the old lines are obliterated and new ones formed, and my property will be advanced to the new line.”75 Arguing that they were not against the opening of Los Angeles Street, the property owners “deny that the Council has a right to destroy the value of their property by abandoning or closing a thoroughfare after it has been accepted as such by the city. They say that in case the Council persists in this action, they will test the matter in the courts.”76 The public debate over the future of Nigger Alley continued into the fall over the powers of the city council versus the rights of the property owners.77 In September, the street superintendent was instructed by the city council to remove obstructions in Los Angeles Street.78 However, both the city council and the property owners on Nigger Alley continued to take actions to protect their respective sides of the issue. On April 30, 1889, the city council adopted “an ordinance ordering the vacation and abandonment of Negro alley for street purposes.”79 This ordinance was adopted by the city council as another effort to resolve the issue of condemning the use of Nigger Alley so that it could be folded into the ongoing extension of Los Angeles Street. Soon after this new ordinance was adopted, one property owner, the persistent Mrs. L. M. Bigelow, decided to begin building a new brick building on the east side of Nigger Alley. A newspaper article in May 1889 announced, “The building will be a large, two-story block, and 75. B. Ballerino, “Letter to the editor,” Los Angeles Herald, February 1, 1888, 8. 76. “Nigger Alley,” Los Angeles Times, September 1, 1888, 2. 77. “Los Angeles Street,” Los Angeles Times, September 6, 1888, 3. 78. “City Council,” Los Angeles Times, September 12, 1888, 2. 79. “The Council,” Los Angeles Times, April 30, 1889, 2.



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will be the first of a number of fine buildings that are to be erected around the Plaza during the next 12 months. Property-holders in that section of the city have made up their minds to improve as rapidly as possible for the reason that the city is moving south at a very rapid rate.”80 The protection and redefining of the built environment of Nigger Alley increased in complexity as property owners took active steps to protect their private property and business interests on Nigger Alley and in the plaza area. Nine days after Bigelow began her new construction project, a neighboring property owner, M. A. Newmark & Co., filed a suit against her, claiming that “without authority of law and without consent and against the wishes of the plaintiff, [Bigelow] illegally took possession of that portion of Negro alley on the extension of Los Angeles street.”81 Three years later, Newmark & Co. went before the city council to ask for the acceptance of Negro Alley as a public highway and that it be called Ferguson Alley.82 By 1894, Ferguson Alley appeared on the Sanborn map as an east-west street linking Alameda to the newly widened North Los Angeles Street, and intersecting with the head of the former Negro Alley, now labeled as an inset frontage row of North Los Angeles Street (Compare figures 5 and 6). The west side of the alley had been reduced to a narrow strip of small properties. Streetwidening demolition to the old block between Sanchez Street and the west side of North Los Angeles Street left vacant lots on the remaining wedge-shaped block on which Philippe Garnier erected a brick building for Chinese merchant lessees (a portion of which now houses the Chinese American Museum). While Bigelow and Ballerino continued to the end of the century to fight unsuccessfully in the courts against the city’s spatial reordering, the nature of what remained of Nigger Alley and Chinatown showed signs of change.83 According to the 1894 Sanborn map (Fig. 6), the western side of the alley held ten one-story storefronts, a couple of vacant building spaces, and two lots that housed hay 80. “Dug Up,” Los Angeles Times, May 14, 1889, 3. 81. “Mrs. Bigelow Sued for Damages in the Negro-alley Hole,” Los Angeles Times, May 23, 1889, 5. 82. “The City Council,” Los Angeles Times, February 9, 1892, 3. 83. “The Supreme Court: Ownership of Negro Alley,” Los Angeles Times, March 19, 1896, 9; “Dole’s New Trial, Negro Alley Title: Bigelow and Ballerino Property Rights Determined in Court,” The Los Angeles Times, August 14, 1896, 8; “Nigger Alley Again,” Los Angeles Times, September 21, 1898, 7; “What Will They Do?,” Los Angeles Times, September 21, 1898, 7; “Twelve Years of Litigation Ended,” Los Angeles Times, December 13, 1900, 110.

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Fig. 6. The 1894 Sanborn map shows Los Angeles Street extended north to connect directly with the central Plaza. Between 1888 and 1894, a reconfigured Nigger Alley emerged with access to North Los Angeles at both ends. 1894 Sanborn Map of Los Angeles, CA (Vol. 1, Sheet 14b). Courtesy of the Geography Map Library, California State University, Northridge.

sheds. On the eastern side, there were seventeen storefronts and a joss house. This section, including the buildings bordering Alameda Street, was listed as “Chinese Quarters.” The interior of the block between Nigger Alley and Alameda Street south of Ferguson Alley and north of Aliso still contained some structures identified by the 1894 Sanborn map as “female boarding” and “sleeping rooms.” But by the turn of the century, many of these had moved east, off Nigger Alley, and were now concentrated on Alameda Street between Ferguson Alley and Aliso Street.



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Fig. 7. The 1906 Sanborn map shows significant spatial and social changes. The west side of Nigger Alley has been pared down and walled off from the recently-widened N. Los Angeles Street. Between issues, the Sanborn Company recorded changes by pasting over the current map. A 1934 version of this map pasted over the offensive term “Nigger Alley.” 1906 Sanborn Map of Los Angeles, CA, 1906-Jan. 1950 (Vol. 3, 1906, Sheet 301). Courtesy of the History Map Collection, Los Angeles Public Library.

The 1906 Sanborn map of the city (Fig. 7) continues to list the name “Nigger Alley”. The western side of the alley no longer had any storefronts. All that was left of the buildings were hay sheds bordered by a brick wall on the side facing Los Angeles Street. According to the 1904 City Directory, the eastern side of the alley had grown in number of storefronts and different types of businesses that included restaurants, billiards halls, a cigar store, a meat store, a locksmith, and general merchandise stores. The interior buildings between Nigger Alley and Alameda Street also included similar listings and more extensive references to Chinatown lodgings, Japanese tenements, single family units, second floor housing, a machine shop, a wagon shop, hay and vegetable storage, Los Angeles Fire Department Engine Company No. 4, a drug store, a sausage factory, and a saloon and liquor store. While almost all of the buildings housed Chinese businesses and residents, the presence of two Japanese-owned billiard halls and one apparently Armenian business, “Moyajian and Arkelian, billiards,” indicate

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some demographic change.84 In the Progressive atmosphere of 1906, the City Directory no longer lists any “female boarding” or “sleeping rooms.” A degree of social and spatial order had been imposed on a zone once considered disorderly, through a variety of individual, civic, and judicial processes, resulting in significant changes in the spatial and human geography of the old Calle de los negros. There in the 1910s, Gone in the 1950s The public debate over the widening of Los Angeles Street and demolition of Nigger Alley continued into the early 1910s.85 The Los Angeles Baist’s Real Estate Survey map of 1921 lists Negro Alley in parentheses underneath the listing of North Los Angeles Street.86 The last year that “Nigger Alley” is listed in the Los Angeles City Directory is 1918. The 1934 Sanborn Map, a paste-over of the 1906 edition, covered over the offensive term “Nigger Alley,” and provided a new name seen nowhere else: “Arcadia Street,” as if the north-south alley were an extension of the nearby east-west Arcadia Street. However, while parentheses, name changes, and paste-overs could whitewash the name, it is clear that the physical place once known as Nigger Alley had not been erased from the landscape. From the 1901 to the 1942 editions of the Los Angeles City Directories, buildings’ business occupants are indicated by street numbers, with individual resident names and business type often included, as well (Table II).87 Based on the directories, one can 84. For a list of businesses on “Nigger Alley, located North from Arcadia ½ blk E of Los Angeles,” from the 1904 Los Angeles City Directory (Los Angeles: W.H.L. Corran, Publisher and Printer, 1904), 1611, that corresponds with the 1906 Sanborn map, see Table II. 85. “City Planning Outlook Wide,” Los Angeles Times, November 17, 1910, II9. 86. B. William Baist, Baist’s Real Estate Atlas Surveys of Los Angeles, Cal. (Philadelphia, 1921), Plate 003. The 1910 version also lists the name Negro Alley underneath the listing for North Los Angeles Street. 87. Los Angeles City and County Directory (1901), 1113. Los Angeles City and County Directory (1902), 1403, locates “Nigger Alley” “North from Arcadia ½ blk east of N. Los Angeles [St.],” and identifies occupants by race. See Table II. Los Angeles City and County Directory (1903), 1566, places “Nigger Alley” “North from Arcadia ½ blk E of Los Angeles [St.],” (See Table II for property occupants). Los Angeles City and County Directory (1904), 1611, places “Nigger Alley” “North from Arcadia ½ blk E. of Los Angeles [St.].” 1906: International Directory of Los Angeles 1906-07: Containing a complete list of those residents and merchants of LA speaking foreign languages, alphabetically cassified [sic] as to their respective languages, and complete Business Directories of the French, German, Italian and Spanish Colonies. Also an International Shoppers Guide (Los Angeles: International Publishing Company, 1907), does not list occupants by street. The first three-fourths of the directory lists alphabetically by business name. The second third lists street names in alphabetical order.



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chart the changing businesses operating on Nigger Alley. In addition, directories through 1904 also listed “Chinese” or “Japanese” for Asian-occupied residential structures. Table II, at the end of this article, identifies each listed street number and its occupants for the years 1901–1918, 1920–1924, 1926–1927, 1932, 1936, 1938–1939, and 1942. By tracing a year vertically, a profile of the street’s usage for that year emerges. By tracing a given address horizontally, the changes in occupancy over time are brought to light. It is clear at once from the predominance of Chinese businesses and dwellings in the table that this was a Chinatown byway from 1901 through 1942. Japanese occupants and businesses appeared briefly from 1902 to 1904, after which they presumably moved to the newly forming Little Tokyo neighborhood a few blocks away. In addition to Clement and Hovey’s restaurant, operating in Ballerino’s former location, there was an occasional Armenian, Greek, or French-owned business in the early years of the century. A Spanish surname appears in the 1909 directory. The changing nature of downtown is indicated by the establishment of a hay and grain business operated by John R. Cate in the 1910s, carried on by his successor into the 1940s, while gas stations and garages were introduced in the 1920s, at first operated by outsiders Barney Katz and R.A. Dumont but joined by one owned by W. S. Yip in 1927. In the 1910s and 1920s, a spate of Italianowned businesses settled on this part of North Los Angeles Street. But throughout the period, it was the Chinese who predominated on the alley variously known as Nigger Alley, North Los Angeles Street and, briefly, Arcadia Street.





1907–1909: Los Angeles City Directory (Los Angeles: Los Angeles City Directory Co. Inc., 1907), 2017, identifies “Nigger Alley: North from ½ blk N of Aliso ½ blk E of Los Angeles, Aliso 400[-block to] Ferguson alley.” Los Angeles City Directory (Los Angeles: Los Angeles City Directory Co. Inc., 1908), 1964, and Los Angeles City Directory (Los Angeles: Los Angeles City Directory Co. Inc., 1909), 1888, are identical to the 1907 directory. 1910: Los Angeles City Directory (Los Angeles: Los Angeles City Directory Co. Inc., 1910), 2024, shows “Nigger Alley” as in the 1907–1909 editions. 1911–1918: The listings remain the same as in 1910. 1911: Los Angeles City Directory (Los Angeles: Los Angeles City Directory Co. Inc., 1911), 1955; Los Angeles City Directory (Los Angeles: Los Angeles City Directory Co. Inc., 1912), n.p.; Los Angeles City Directory (Los Angeles: Los Angeles City Directory Co. Inc., 1913), 105; Los Angeles City Directory (Los Angeles: Los Angeles City Directory Co. Inc., 1914), 106; LA City Directory (Los Angeles: LA City Directory Co. Inc., 1915), 102; The New Los Angeles Classified Business Directory (Los Angeles: LA City Directory Co. Inc.,1916), only listed by type of business. Los Angeles City Directory (Los Angeles: Los Angeles City Directory Co. Inc., 1917), 109; Los Angeles City Directory (Los Angeles: Los Angeles City Directory Co. Inc. 1918), 117. 1920–1923: No listing of Nigger Alley in these editions of the city directory.

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Even though there are no longer signs of vice on Nigger Alley in the business listings for the 1910s to 1940s, local government continued to regard Chinatown and other racial enclaves as disorderly districts. According to historian Natalia Molina, “health inspectors [of the 1910s and 1920s] believed the Chinese were naturally prone to diseases such as leprosy and hookworm. In depicting Chinese bodies as more susceptible to disease…public health officials showed that they were not only screening to determine who would be good laborers but also to determine who were fit to be citizens.”88 The resulting public policy medically racialized the Chinese as consistent public health threats.89 As a result, the Chinese community was a prime target for efforts to control potential disease. On the plaza, the social science of urban renewal used medical and economic rationales to condemn the original Chinatown in the early twentieth century.90 The City News summarized these “reforms” in 1933: “Progress and modernization, coupled with the demands of a new civilization, had notified the Orientals that their quarters were to be needed…” (my emphasis).91 Chief among those urban renewal projects was the plan for Union Station, which would serve all rail lines, a project conceived in the 1910s and realized in the 1930s.92 But the health and urban-renewal assaults by local government in the 1920s and 1930s were not so easily carried out as Jacob Kurhts’s unannounced demolition had been back in 1888. The Chinese community, including a generation of American-born Chinese, who were US citizens, had the strength to resist, and this is apparent from the rise of new institutions during the 1920s and 1930s recorded in the City Directories and summarized in Table II. Through the 1910s, Chinese-owned businesses lined Nigger Alley/North Los Angeles Street. 88. Natalia Molina, “Medicalizing the Mexican: Immigration, Race, and Disability in the EarlyTwentieth-Century United States,” Radical History Review, 94 (Winter 2006): 26. 89. Ibid., 22–37. 90. Nora Sterry, “The Sociological Basis for the Re-Organization of the Macy Street School” (M.A. Thesis, University of Southern California, 1924); Elizabeth Fuller, “The Mexican Housing Problem in Los Angeles,” Studies in Sociology, Vol. 5, November 1920; Gladys Emelia Patric, “A Study of Housing and Social Conditions in the Ann Street District of Los Angeles,” Los Angeles Society for the Prevention of Tuberculosis (Los Angeles: University of Southern California), 1917; Natalia Molina “Illustrating Cultural Authority: Medicalized Representations of Mexican Communities in Early Twentieth-Century Los Angeles,” Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies (Spring 2003): 129–143. 91. City News, 1933. 92. “Bitter Thirty Years’ War on Again Today,” Los Angeles Times, November 18, 1912, II1; “Union Station Recommended,” Los Angeles Times, October 26, 1915, II3.



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Fig. 8. By the 1920s, Negro Alley went by the name of North Los Angeles Street. While the west side of Negro Alley had been reduced to a narrow median strip, the east side was still occupied by the old row of Chinese-owned businesses. Among them was a Chinese YMCA at 406 and an Upper Room facility of the Chinese Presbyterian Church at 420½. Photographer C. C. Pierce. Courtesy of the University of Southern California Libraries, Title Insurance and Trust/C.C. Pierce Photography Collection.

In the early 1920s, a Chinese Presbyterian Mission, a Brethren Chinese Mission, a YMCA Chinese school, and a public school designated for Chinese students sprang up in the directory listings—signs of assimilation. Beginning in 1924, the directory identified a Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association, a Chinese Chamber of Commerce, and a Chinese American Citizens Alliance.93 Politicized Chinese became involved in international affairs as evidenced by the office of a Los Angeles branch of the Chinese Nationalist Party in 1929. And, finally, a Chinese Free Mason Hall appeared in the 1938 and 1942 directories. When eminent domain did displace the part of Chinatown east of Alameda for the construction of Union Station, it did not displace 93. Historian William D. Estrada explains how the Los Angeles Chinese Chamber of Commerce proposed actions in 1924 to “reshape the overall image of Chinatown in the public mind” with the goal of attracting more “white people of the city and tourists to visit Chinatown.” Estrada, The Los Angeles Plaza, 217.

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Fig. 9. In this birdseye photograph taken about 1931 from City Hall tower before Union Station was built, North Los Angeles Street appears in the lower left. Between the median strip and the east-side row of businesses cars are parked on what had once been Negro Alley. In the lower left corner of the photo, the 3-story Jennette and Garnier blocks occupy the west side of N. Los Angeles Street. In the center foreground a streetcar turns from Aliso Street onto Los Angeles Street where the 101 Freeway is now located. Photographer C. C. Pierce & Co. Courtesy of the University of Southern California Libraries, Title Insurance and Trust/C.C. Pierce Photography Collection.

the section west of Alameda that included the North Los Angeles Street/Nigger Alley section, as the listings in the 1942 city directory make clear. But it is noteworthy that Union Station, completed in 1939, while incorporating stylistic references to the historic California missions and the Spanish Colonial Revival architecture popular in the early twentieth century (but no references to the Chinatown it supplanted), embodied modernity in its form and function. The train station was designed for maximum efficiency, from its ticket windows to its track access—a contrast with the crooked streets and uneven facades that had characterized the Chinese community it replaced.



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Fig. 10. In the 1955 Sanborn map, all of the old Chinatown between Los Angeles Street and Alameda Street has been demolished for the Hollywood Freeway and its ramps. 1955 Sanborn Map of Los Angeles, 1906–Jan. 1955 (Vol. 3, 1906, Republished 1953, Sheet 301). Courtesy of the History Map Collection, Los Angeles Public Library. Use of 1955 reprinted / used with permission from The Sanborn Library, LLC.

Despite the dramatic changes to old Chinatown, there remained a vibrant Chinese community of businesses and community resources in and around the 400 block of North Los Angeles Street, including the remnants of Nigger Alley. Pictures from the 1930s show how this section of old Chinatown persevered as an important location of the Chinese community of Los Angeles until this section was razed in the early 1950s. The final changes to North Los Angeles Street happened in the early 1950s when the Hollywood Freeway (San Fernando Valley to Downtown Los Angeles) was constructed. It opened on

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April 16, 1954. In the Sanborn map of the city from 1950, the “future street lines” for the final extension of Los Angeles Street, including the proposed road outlines of the freeway on-ramps and freeway, are noted in the area where Nigger Alley used to be. In the Sanborn map of the city from 1955 (Fig. 10), the freeway on-ramps and freeway are complete, and all traces of Nigger Alley and the community that lived and worked there have been obliterated. Conclusion Richard Flores remarks in his examination of the Alamo, “Forgetting is not a passive experience; like remembering, it is an active process that involves erasure.”94 And William Deverell has remarked, “Los Angeles matured, at least in part, by covering up places, people, and histories that those in power found unsettling.”95 One way to begin to get more specific about the history of a place is to examine the origins of the naming and meaning of the streets. The renaming of streets in and around the city center has been a common part of the evolving use and imagery of the built environment. After the US acquisition of California in the mid-nineteenth century, various street names were translated from Spanish into English, such as Calle Principal into Main Street and Calle Primavera into Spring Street. In the case of Calle de los negros, simple translation was not possible because of the cultural meanings with which the English words “Negro” and “Nigger” were burdened. Instead, learning about Calle de los negros is also about understanding complex and constantly changing racialized perceptions of and by multiethnic and multiracial residents. Calle de los negros was named, perhaps playfully, during the era of the Californios, when race and social class were relatively flexible. Anglos translated the street’s name to a term indicating a racial divide. The pejorative terms Negro Alley and Nigger Alley were used and recognized by city officials, maps, city directories (including Chinese business directories), and by popular usage to designate a particular late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century racialized place in the plaza area. After Negro Alley became the heart of a Chinese community, the name was changed again, this time to North 94. Richard R. Flores, Remembering the Alamo: Memory, Modernity, and the Master Symbol (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002), xv. 95. William Deverell, Whitewashed Adobe: The Rise of Los Angeles and the Remaking of Its Mexican Past (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004), 7.



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Los Angeles Street, and, on one record, briefly to Arcadia street both as extensions of nearby thoroughfares, as if, by erasing its distinctive name, the place had ceased to exist. This case study also demonstrates how Calle de los negros, by whatever name, was perceived as a place identified as physically, morally, and racially disorderly. It looks at mob, civic, and property-owner efforts to combat such disorder. In 1871 an Anglo and Mexican mob attacked the Chinese on Nigger Alley, and city law enforcement did not halt the violence. In the years that followed, city officials sought to eliminate the troubled area by cutting Los Angeles Street through it. Property owners protested and competed to reshape the boundaries of Nigger Alley to suit their own interests. In 1888 a city street superintendent’s crew demolished structures on the alley and, in spite of property-owners’ resistance, properties on the west side of the alley were sliced through by North Los Angeles Street. By 1906, only a thin island remained, relegating Nigger Alley to a mere frontage row for North Los Angeles Street. Local health authorities joined the efforts to impose order on the Chinese community. And in 1933 the section of Chinatown east of Alameda Street was taken by eminent domain as the site for a railroad station. In 1952, the section between North Los Angeles Street and Alameda that included the old Nigger Alley was taken, too, again by eminent domain, this time to make way for the Hollywood Freeway. By 1955 the section of Chinatown north of Ferguson Alley had been cleared for the freeway project as well. As the old Nigger Alley was being physically reshaped, reduced, and finally obliterated, the disorder that had once been associated with it also disappeared—first the internecine disputes among the Chinese; then the brothels that had coexisted in the district, along with the Chinese gaming establishments. Missions, benevolent associations, a Chinese chamber of commerce, and Chinese American political and social institutions took their place, evidence of assimilation and internal order. By the time this short byway had disappeared under a swirl of freeway ramps; disorder had been replaced with order. In spite of all these assaults, the Chinese community stayed, not totally relocating from the street-of-many-names until the early 1950s. The Los Angeles plaza provided succeeding generations of Angelenos, especially working-class Mexican, Chinese, and European immigrants,

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with important social and cultural space.96 By the 1920s and 1930s, the rise in Mexican immigrants and decline in European immigrants residing in the plaza area helped to create a renewed México de Afuera.97 On the north side of the plaza, civic leaders and activist Christine Sterling undertook what scholar Raul Villa has called “creative destruction,” redeveloping Olvera Street as a racial tourism site depicting a romanticized “Mexican marketplace.”98 It opened in 1930. In 1938 the same business and activist leaders opened another racial tourism site, China City, northwest of the Plaza, in competition with a nearby “New Chinatown” developed under the leadership of the Chinese Chamber of Commerce as a depression-era money-maker.99 All of these amusement centers catered to Euro American racial fictions. The real landmarks of the history of the Chinese and Mexicans in Los Angeles were swept away in the early 1950s for the building of the Hollywood freeway. Along with this finale, another erasure of history on the plaza occurred as the cultural and historical landscape was being transformed. In reviewing the 1955 Sanborn map of the plaza area (Fig. 10), one can see where the Lugo House and all of the adjacent historic buildings from Ferguson Alley to Sunset Boulevard (including Ferguson Alley) had once existed. All had been razed, erased from the plaza landscape, by 1952. Hegemonic historical preservation that commemorates events and sites associated with the dominant social element while demolishing sites important to other groups is a form of systemic violence masked by a tone of romanticism, professionalism, and civic improvement. The story of Calle de los negros is an example of the erasure of real (as opposed to fictional) landmarks of Californio, Mexican, and Chinese history at the heart of the city.100 The politics of “selective preservation” on the plaza resulted in the valuing of a particular version of history that was actively crafted under the leadership of people like Christine Sterling, the Los Angeles city council, and later (1953) in the designa96. Estrada, Los Angeles Plaza, 93. 97. See Monroy, Rebirth, 7 and Estrada, Los Angeles Plaza, 118. 98. Villa looks at the processes of physical (urban renewal) and symbolic (erasure of history) changes to the built environment as “creative destruction”–by which the built environment was re-imagined to enhance the growth and spur the economy toward progress. Raul H. Villa, Barrio-Logos: Space and Place in Urban Chicano Literature and Culture (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000), 19. 99. Poole and Ball, El Pueblo, 44–57; Deverell, Whitewashed Adobe, 251; “New Chinatown Proposed,” Los Angeles Times, October 18, 1933, A3. 100. Avila, Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight, 16-19.



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tion of the plaza area as a State Historic Park.101 At the same time, the official narrative being crafted by civic boosters and the city council simultaneously promoted a Eurocentric focus and historical amnesia about the racialized history of the city.102 This study explored the process of how a place became racialized and how a racialized space was obliterated in the name of social and spatial order—a case history of phenomena that may be applicable to other minority communities in American history.

101. In 1953, the state of California, the city of Los Angeles, and the county of Los Angeles entered into agreements that led to the acquisition of the plaza area (buildings) and shared administrative oversight of the area as a state historic park. Efforts to preserve the east side of the 400 and 500 blocks of North Los Angeles Street, along with the Lugo House (1838) and an original section of “old Chinatown” that would have also included Nigger Alley, were not a part of the “selective preservation” that the backers of the state historic park envisioned. By 1963, the cooperative agreement regarding oversight and control of El Pueblo was challenged by the state legislature. “Plaza State Park Receives Final OK: Supervisors Approve Project,” Los Angeles Times, March 25, 1953, A1. “State Buys Pico House as Part of Plaza Park,” Los Angeles Times, August 19, 1953, A1; Charles E. Davis, “Dispute Over Control Halts Restoration of L.A. Plaza,” Los Angeles Times, September 9, 1963, A1; Estrada, The Los Angeles Plaza, 242–245. Estrada explains how the local Chinese community included the Lugo House (1838) and the other remaining sections of the original Chinatown in the preservation debates of the 1940s. However, as a result of what Estrada labels “selective preservation” on the part of Ms. Christine Sterling and other supporters of El Pueblo, a significant historic building of the Mexican era and other buildings (and street blocks) that were a part of the original Chinatown were demolished. 102. Setha M. Low, On The Plaza: The Politics of Public Space and Culture (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000), 122.

411

Chinese

Chinese Chinese

406

408 410

Address Address City Directory (west side of (east 1901 street) side of “Nigger Alley. street) North from Arcadia ½ blk east of N. Los Angeles.”

A. 1901–1907

TABLE II: Nigger Alley and North Los Angeles Street

Clements & Hovey, rest. vacant Japanese

City Directory 1902 & 1903 (no changes) “Nigger Alley. North from Arcadia ½ blk east of N. Los Angeles.”

Wo Hop, rest. Japanese

Ballerino Bartolo.

City Directory 1904 “Nigger Alley. North from Arcadia ½ blk E of Los Angeles.”

vacant vacant

vacant

City Directory 1905 “Nigger Alley. North from Arcadia ½ blk E of Los Angeles.”

Quong Yate Co., (N. LA St.)

City Directory 1906 Nigger Alley and North Los Angeles Street listing under Chinese MerchantsGeneral Significant number of new listing on both sides of the street.

1901 to 1942 Street Descriptions and Businesses Listed in the Los Angeles City Directory

Yate Quong Co, Chinese merchant (N. LA St.)

City Directory 1907 “Nigger Alley: North from ½ blk N of Aliso ½ blk E of Los Angeles Aliso 400 Ferguson alley”

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417

415

413

420

418

416

414

412

Hong Chung Co.

Wong Sing, meats. Yee Sing Co. Fukuhara & Fugimoto Co.

Sam Sing, meats.

Hin Bow Ton & Hin Bow Ton & Co. Co.

Hong Chung Co.

Moyajian & Arkelian, billiards.

Tanignichi H, billiards.

vacant

Hinata H, billiards. vacant

Arkelian John, billiards.

Moyajian & Arkelian, billiards.

Coey Ying Lung Co., Chinese merchant (N. LA St.)

Yick Chong & Co, Chinese merchant (Nigger Alley)

Ying Lung Coey Co, Chinese merchant, (N. LA St.)

Hop Kee & Co., Hop Kee & Chinese merchant Co, Chinese merchant (N. (N. LA St) LA St.)

Boo Tsoo Tong, Tsoo Bow Chinese merchant Tong, Chinese (N. LA St.) merchant, (N. LA St.)

lost in translation 67

427

423

421

428

Sun Lee Lung

Quong Mee Lung & Co.

426

Sun Lee Lung & Lokee.

Quong Mee Lung & Co.

Chinese

Chinese

424 1/2

vacant

Quong Sang Wo Quong Sang Wo Kee Kee & Co. & Co.

Ballerino Bartolo, rest.

424

422

A. 1901–1907 (Continued)

Sam Sing & Co., meats.

Qoung [sic] Mee Lung & Co, cigars.

Chee Yun, rest.

Sam Sing & Co., meats.

Chee Yun, rest. Qoung [sic] Mee Lung & Co, cigars.

Wing Wo Sun & Co, Chinese merchant (N. LA St.)

Quong Mee Lung & Co., (Nigger Alley) Sam Lee Co., Lee Sam Chinese merchant Co, Chinese (N. LA St.) merchant (N. LA St.)

Chong Kee Co., Kee Chong Chinese merchant Co, Chinese (N. LA St.) merchant, (N. LA St.) On Guey & Co, Chinese merchant (Nigger Alley)

Sun Wing Wo & Co., Chinese merchant (N. LA St.)

68

southern california quarterly

429

Ging Lung & Co.

Chinese

Chinese

Hong Hop & Co, genl mdse.

Ging Lung & Co, genl mdse.

Ging Lung & Co.

Chinese

434 1/2

Hong Hop & Co.

Qwong On & Co, genl mdse.

438

Honk Hop & Co.

434

Qwong On & Co.

Quong Jon Co, locksmiths.

Poon Kee & Co, genl mdse.

Qwong On & Co.

432

Quong Jon Co.

436

Quong Jou Co.

430

Yick Lung Co, Yick Lung & Chinese merchant Co, Chinese Nigger Alley) merchant (Nigger Alley) Ging Lung & Ging Lung & Co, Lung Ging Co, genl mdse. Chinese merchant Co, Chinese (Nigger Alley) merchant, (Nigger Alley)

Tsue Wah Yuen and Co, genl msde.

Hia Lung, Chinese Lung Tai, merchant (N. LA Chinese St.) merchant (N. LA St.) Quong Jon Quong & Jon Co, Co, Chinese locksmiths. merchant (Nigger Alley) Qwong On & Qwong On & Co, On Qwong, Co, genl mdse. (Nigger Alley) Chinese merchant (Nigger Alley) Hong Hop & Hong Hop & Co, Hop Hong & Co, genl mdse. Chinese merchant Co, Chinese (Nigger Alley) merchant (Nigger Alley) Chinese

lost in translation 69

409

405

Address (west side of street)

406

Address (east side of street)

B. 1908–1913

Ling Wong, Chinese merchant (Nigger Alley) Wo Shung Co, Chinese merchant (N. LA St.)

City Directory 1908 “Nigger Alley: North from ½ blk N of Aliso ½ blk E of Los Angeles Aliso 400 Ferguson alley”

Wo Shung Co, Chinese merchant (N. LA St.)

City Directory 1909 “Nigger Alley: North from ½ blk N of Aliso ½ blk E of Los Angeles ½ blk N of Aliso 400 Ferguson alley”

J G Godissart, restaurant Nen Tong Lem Kee Wing, Chinese merchant (Nigger Alley)

City Directory 1911 “Nigger Alley: North from ½ blk N of Aliso ½ blk E of Los Angeles (also known as Los Angeles) ½ blk N of Aliso 400 Ferguson alley”

Wo Shung Co, Wo Shung Co, Chinese merchant Chinese merchant (N. LA St.) (N. LA St.)

City Directory 1910 “Nigger Alley: North from ½ blk N of Aliso ½ blk E of Los Angeles ½ blk N of Aliso 400 Ferguson alley”

Wo Shung Co, Chinese merchant (N. LA St.)

City Directory 1912 “Nigger Alley: North from ½ blk N of Aliso ½ blk E of Los Angeles (also known as Los Angeles) ½ blk N of Aliso 400 Ferguson alley”

Wo Shung Co, Chinese merchant (N. LA St.)

City Directory 1913 “Nigger Alley: North from ½ blk N of Aliso ½ blk E of Los Angeles (also known as Los Angeles) ½ blk N of Aliso 400 Ferguson alley”

70

southern california quarterly

417

415

413

411

420

418

412

Tsoo Bow Tong, Chinese merchant, (N. LA St.) Hop Kee Quong & Co, Chinese merchant (N. LA St.) Ying Lung Coey Co, Chinese merchant, (N. LA St.)

Yate Quong Co, Chinese merchant (N. LA St.)

Hilario Preciado

Ying Lung Coey Co, Chinese merchant, (N. LA St.) Yuen Kim & Co, Chinese merchant, (N. LA St.)

Ying Lung Coey Co, Ying Lung Coey Co, Ying Lung Coey Chinese merchant, Chinese merchant, Co, Chinese (N. LA St.) merchant, (N. LA (N. LA St.) St.)

Chong Key Co, Chinese merchant (N. LA St.)

Hop Kee Quong Chong Key Co, & Co, Chinese Chinese merchant merchant (N. (N. LA St.) LA St.)

Yate Quong, Chinese merchant (N. LA St.)

Tsoo Bow Tong, Chinese merchant, (N. LA St.)

Yate Quong, Yate Quong, Chinese merchant Chinese merchant (N. LA St.) (N. LA St.)

Tsoo Bow Tong, Chinese merchant, (N. LA St.)

Yate Quong Co, Chinese merchant (N. LA St.) Alex Kochopoulos Tsoo Bow Tong, Chinese merchant, (N. LA St.)

Ying Lung Coey, Chinese merchant (N. LA St.)

Yate Quong, Chinese merchant (N. LA St.)

lost in translation 71

425 ½

425

423

421

424

Wing Wo Sun & Co, Chinese merchant (N. LA St.) Kee Chong Co, Chinese merchant, (N. LA St.) On Guey Co, Chinese merchant (Nigger Alley) Hai Yat Co, Chinese merchant (N. LA St.)

B. 1908–1913 (Continued)

Rise Sun, Chinese merchant, (N. LA St.) Rise Sun, Chinese merchant, (N. LA St.)

Kee Chong Co, Chinese merchant, (N. LA St.) On Guey Co, Chinese merchant (Nigger Alley)

Wing Wo Sun & Co, Chinese merchant (N. LA St.) Kee Chong Co, Chinese merchant, (N. LA St.)

Wing Wo Sun & Co, Chinese merchant (N. LA St.)

On Guey Co, Chinese merchant (Nigger Alley)

Wing Wo Sun & Co, Chinese merchant (N. LA St.)

On Guey Co, Chinese merchant (Nigger Alley)

Wing Wo Sun & Co, Chinese merchant (N. LA St.)

On Guey Co, Chinese merchant (N. LA St.)

Wing Wo Sun & Co, Chinese merchant (N. LA St.)

72

southern california quarterly

429

427

434

432

428

426

Hop Hong & Co, Chinese merchant (Nigger Alley)

Lung Tai, Chinese merchant (N. LA St.) On Qwong & Co, Chinese merchant (Nigger Alley)

Mee Lung Quong, Chinese merchant (Nigger Alley) Lee Sam Co, Chinese merchant (N. LA St.)

Hop Hong & Co, Chinese merchant (Nigger Alley)

Lung Tai, Chinese merchant (N. LA St.) On Kwong Co, Chinese merchant (Nigger Alley)

Lung Tai, Chinese merchant (N. LA St.)

Lee Sam Lee-Sam Co, Co, Chinese Chinese merchant merchant (N. (N. LA St.) LA St.) Sing Sam & Co

Mee Lung Quong, Chinese merchant (Nigger Alley)

Hop Hong & Co, Chinese merchant (Nigger Alley)

On Kwong Co, Chinese merchant (Nigger Alley)

Mee Lung Quong, Chinese merchant (Nigger Alley)

Hop Hong & Co, Chinese merchant (Nigger Alley)

On Kwong Co, Chinese merchant (Nigger Alley) / Sam Ying Wong, Chinese merchant, (Nigger Alley)

Sing Sam & Co, Chinese merchant, (Nigger Alley) Lung Tai, Chinese merchant (N. LA St.)

Mee Lung Quong, Chinese merchant (Nigger Alley)

Lung Tai, Chinese merchant (N. LA St.)

lost in translation 73

437

438

436

Lung Ging & Co, Chinese merchant (Nigger Alley)

Fung Lung & Co, Chinese merchant (Nigger Alley)

B. 1908–1913 (Continued)

Lung Ging & Co, Chinese merchant (Nigger Alley)

Fung Lung & Co, Chinese merchant (Nigger Alley)

Lung Ging & Co, Chinese merchant (Nigger Alley)

Fung Lung & Co, Chinese merchant (Nigger Alley)

Amati & Mazzoni, saloon Lung Ging & Co, Chinese merchant (Nigger Alley)

Fung Lung & Co, Chinese merchant (Nigger Alley)

74

southern california quarterly

Address (west side of street)

406

404

400

Address (east side of street)

C. 1914–1920

City Directory 1914 “Nigger Alley: North from ½ blk N of Aliso ½ blk E of Los Angeles (also known as Los Angeles) ½ blk N of Aliso 400 Ferguson alley”

City Directory 1915 “Nigger Alley: North from ½ blk N of Aliso ½ blk E of Los Angeles (also known as Los Angeles) ½ blk N of Aliso 400 Ferguson alley” *These businesses previously listed on Nigger Alley are now listed with a N. Los Angeles address. Aperry & Zucca Guiseppe Fannucchi

City Directory 1916 The New LA Classified Business Directory (only listed by type of business) Combines Chinese and Japanese Goods. Change in listing format does not list any businesses in the 400 block of N. LA St. or Nigger Alley.

City Directory 1917 “Nigger Alley: North from ½ blk N of Aliso ½ blk E of Los Angeles (also known as Los Angeles) ½ blk N of Aliso 400 Ferguson alley”

City Directory 1918 “Nigger Alley: North from ½ blk N of Aliso ½ blk E of Los Angeles (also known as Los Angeles) ½ blk N of Aliso 400 Ferguson alley”

Chinese Presbyterian Mission

Jos Gamba, meats

City Directory 1920 no listing of Nigger Alley. All listings are for N. Los Angeles St.

lost in translation 75

415

411

409

407

416

414

410

408

Yate Quong, Chinese merchant (N. LA St.)

J R Cate (Hay and Grain)

Chew Lung Quong, Chinese merchant (N. LA St.)

C. 1914–1920 (Continued)

Yate Quong, Chinese merchant (N. LA St.)

Chew Lung Quong, Chinese merchant (N. LA St.) J R Cate (Hay and Grain)

Frazer-Johnson Cigar Co

Asiatic Herb Co (N. LA St.)

Chew Lung Quong, Chinese merchant (N. LA St.) J R Cate (Hay R A Dumont, and Grain) garage (N. LA St.) Yate Quong, Yate Quong, Chinese Chinese merchant (N. LA merchant (N. St.) LA St.) J R Cate, hay and grain (N. LA St.)

Chew Lung Quong, Chinese merchant (N. LA St.)

Harry Wong, Chinese merchant

John R Cate (feed)

Yate Quong, Chinese merchant

First Presbyterian (Chinese) Chew Lung Quong, Chinese merchant

76

southern california quarterly

425

423

421

419

417

424

420

Ong [sic] Guey Co, Chinese merchant (N. LA St.)

Wing Wo Sun & Co, Chinese merchant (N. LA St.)

Ying Lung Coey, Chinese merchant (N. LA St.)

Wing Wo Sun & Co, Chinese merchant (N. LA St.) Agostino Cerrina, restaurant (N. LA St.) On Guey Co, Chinese merchant (N. LA St.) Jos Meldigo, cook / Eli Micheli, waiter

Shuey Cheung, Chinese merchant (N. LA St.)

On Guey Co, Chinese merchant

Wing Wo Sun Co, Chinese merchant

Shuey Wo Young Tong Cheung, Co, Chinese Chinese Herbs merchant (N. LA St.)

Wing Sun & Co, Chinese merchant (N. LA St.) Augustine Cerrina, restaurant (N. LA St.) On Guey On Guey Co, Chinese Co, Chinese merchant (N. LA merchant (N. St.) LA St.)

Wing Wo Sun & Co, Chinese merchant (N. LA St.) Wing Wo Sun & Co, Chinese merchant (N. LA St.) Wing Wo Sun & Co, Chinese merchant (N. LA St.) Agostino Cerrina, restaurant (N. LA St.)

Shuey Cheung, Chinese merchant (N. LA St.)

lost in translation 77

429

Sing Sam & Co, Chinese merchant (N. LA St.)

428

On Kwong Co, Chinese merchant (N. LA St.) / Sam Ying Wong, Chinese merchant (N. LA St.) Hop Hong & Co, Chinese merchant (N. LA St.)

432

434

Jon Quong Co, Chinese merchant (N. LA St.)

430

Lee Wing, Chinese merchant (N. LA St.)

Mee Lung Quong Co, Chinese merchant (N. LA St.)

426

C. 1914–1920 (Continued)

Hop Hong & Co, Chinese merchant (N. LA St.)

On Kwong & Co, Chinese merchant (N. LA St.)

Mee Lung Quong & Co, Chinese merchant (N. LA St.) Sing Sam & Co, Chinese merchant (N. LA St.)

Hop Hong & Co, Chinese merchant (N. LA St.)

On Kwong Co, Chinese merchant

Jon Quong Co, Chinese merchant

D K Kwong & Co, Chinese merchant

Mee Lung Quong & Co, Chinese merchant

Hop Hong & Hop Hong & Co, Co, Chinese Chinese merchant merchant (N. LA St.)

Mee Lung Quong & Co, Chinese merchant (N. LA St.) Sing Sam & Sing Sam & Co, Chinese Co, Chinese merchant (N. LA merchant (N. St.) LA St.) D R Kwong, Chinese merchant (N. LA St.) Jon Quong C[o], Chinese merchant (N. LA St.) On Kwong On Kwong Co, Chinese Co, Chinese merchant (N. LA merchant (N. LA St.) St.)

Mee Lung Quong & Co, Chinese merchant (N. LA St.)

78

southern california quarterly

Lung Ging & Co, Chinese merchant (N. LA St.)

438

401

400

Jos Gamba, meats

Address Address City Directory 1921 (west side of (east side N. Los Angeles St. street) of street)

D. 1921–1927

438 ½

Lung Fung & Co, Chinese merchant (N. LA St.)

436

City Directory 1922 N. Los Angeles St.

Lung Ging & Co, Chinese merchant (N. LA St.)

Lung Fung & Co, Chinese merchant (N. LA St.)

City Directory 1923 N. Los Angeles St. Jos Gamba, meats

Guiseppe Gamba, meats

City Directory 1924 N. Los Angeles St.

Lung Fung & Co, Chinese merchant (N. LA St.) Lung Ging & Co, Chinese merchant (N. LA St.)

Jos Gamba (meats) Café Paris

City Directory 1926 N. Los Angeles St.

Lung Fung & Co, Chinese merchant (N. LA St.) Lung Ging & Co, Chinese merchant (N. LA St.)

Jos Gamba (meats)

City Directory 1927 N. Los Angeles St.

Lung Ging & Co, Chinese merchant

Lung Fung & Co, Chinese merchant

lost in translation 79

409

407 ½

407

410

408

406

Chew Lung Quong, Chinese merchant

First Presbyterian (Chinese) / Chinese Presbyterian Mission

Yen Lee Kong, Chinese merchant / To Quon, Chinese merchant

Young Men’s Christian Assn School (Chinese)

D. 1921–1927 (Continued)

First Presbyterian (Chinese)

Young Men’s Christian Assn School (Chinese)

Chew Lung Chew Lung Quong, Chinese Quong merchant (Chinese mdse)

First Presbyterian (Chinese)

Young Men’s Christian Assn School (Chinese) / Chinese Presbyterian Mission Yen Lee King, Chinese merchant Yen Lee Quen

Barney Katz & Son (Barney and R R) gas sta and garage

Barney Katz & Son (Barney and R R) gas sta and garage

First Presbyterian First Presbyterian Church Church (Chinese) (Chinese) Rev J Y Lee pastor Chew Lung Quong, Chinese merchant

Yen Lee Kong, Chinese merchant

Barney Katz & Son (Barney and R R) gas sta and garage

Hotel de Paris, fur rms

80

southern california quarterly

415

413

411½

411

416

415 ½

414

Chinese American Citizens Alliance / Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Assn

Sam Quong, Chinese merchant

Loy Hong, Chinese merchant

Yate Quong, Chinese merchant

Chinese Mission (Brethren)

Sing Noe, Chinese merchant

Yate Quong Co, Chinese merchant

J R Cate (Hay, straw & feed) Su Kiang Co, Chinese mdse Chinese American Citizen Alliance / Chinese Chamber of Commerce / Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Assn

Chinese American Citizens Alliance

Yate Quong, Chinese merchant John R Cate (feed)

John R Cate (feed) Su Kiang Co

Yate Quong (Chinese mdse)

Su Kiong (Kiang) Co (Chinese mdse)

Shing Dai Chinese merchant

Yate Quong, Chinese merchant

Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Assn / Native Sons of the Golden State (Chinese) Los Angeles Parlor, meets here

J R Cate (Hay, straw & feed)

lost in translation 81

419 ½

419

417a or ½

417

420

418 ½

418

Chinese School, Mrs M A Mann prin

Wo Young Tong Co, Chinese Herbs

D. 1921–1927 (Continued)

Apostolic Faith (Mexican)

Mon Quong Wong Co, Chinese merchant (N. LA St.)

Wo Tong Young Co, Chinese merchant

Mary Young (fur rms) Hing Wah & Wing Wo Sung Co & Co, Chinese merchant

Chinese Chamber of Commerce

Wo Young Tong Wo Tong Co, Chinese Young Co merchant (mdse)

First Presbyterian (Chinese) Rev J Y Lee pastor

Wing Wo Sun & Co, Chinese merchant

Wo Tong Yick Co, Chinese merchant / Wo Tong Young Co / Hing Yuen Co

Wing Wo Sun & Co, art gds, Chinese merchant

Chinese Chamber of Commerce

82

southern california quarterly

425

423

421

424

422

420 ½

On Guey Co, Chinese merchant

Sang Wo, Chinese merchant

Wing Wo Sun Co, Chinese merchant

On Guey Co, Chinese merchant Lee Sai, Chinese merchant

Wing Wo Sun Co, Chinese merchant

Sang Wo, Chinese merchant Yinkin Chinese School

Wing Wo Sung & Co, Chinese merchant

Sang Wo, Chinese merchant

Sang Wo, Chinese merchant / Wing Wo Sun & Co, Chinese merchant

Non Woo Co, Chinese merchant

Yin Kin (Chinese)

First Presbyterian Church (Chinese) Rev J Y Lee pastor Sun Tai Co

Upper Room

Upper Room / First Presbyterian Church (Chinese) Rev J Y Lee pastor

lost in translation 83

431

429

427

430

428

426

Jon Quong Co, Chinese merchant

Man Hing Quong Co, Chinese merchant

Mee Lung Quong & Co, Chinese merchant

D. 1921–1927 (Continued)

Wah Sam Co, Chinese merchant

Jon Quong Co, Chinese merchant

Sing Sam & Co, Chinese merchant

Mee Lung Quong & Co, Chinese merchant

Wah Sam Co Ward Sam & Co, Chinese merchant Jon Quong Jon Quong Co (Chinese Co, Chinese merchant mdse) / Brethren Chinese Mission School

Non Hoo Co

Ward Sam Co, Chinese merchant Brethren Brethren Chinese Mission Chinese Mission

Hing Yuen Co

W S Yip (gas & oil service station)

84

southern california quarterly

447

433

440

Lung Ging & Co, Chinese merchant (N. LA St.)

Lung Fung & Co, Chinese merchant (N. LA St.)

436

438

Hop Hong & Co, Chinese merchant

Canton Co, Chinese merchant

On Kwong Co, Chinese merchant

434

432 ½

432

Lung Ging & Co, Chinese merchant (N. LA St.)

Canton Co, Chinese merchant Hop Hong & Co, Chinese merchant Lung Fung & Co, Chinese merchant (N. LA St.)

On Kwong Co, Chinese merchant / On Quong Co, Chinese merchant

Mon Quong Wong, Chinese merchant

On Guey Co, Chinese merchant

Hee Gee Co (Chinese mdse)

Eastern Grocery Co

Mexican Mission Mexican Mission Mexican Mission

On Guey Co On Guey Co, Chinese mdse

Mon Lung Wong

Mexican Mission

lost in translation 85

Lung Fung & Co Lung Ging & Co

452

Hop Hong & Co

450

448 ½

448

On Kwong Co

Sing Sam & Co

444

444 ½ 446

Mee Lung Qung & Co

442

D. 1921–1927 (Continued)

Lung Fung & Co, Chinese merchant Lung Ging & Co, Chinese merchant

On Kwong Co, Chinese merchant Hop Hong Co, Chinese merchant

Mee Lung Quong & Co, Chinese mdse

Lung Fung Co, Chinese merchant

Jon Quong Co On Kwong Co, Chinese merchant Hop Hong Co, Chinese merchant

Mee Lung Quong & Co, Chinese mdse Sing Sam & Co

Wun Sun Wong Assn

86

southern california quarterly

413

411 ½

409

407 ½

401

Address (west side of street)

411

410

408

406

Young May Photo Studio Loy Quon Co (restr) Tung Lew (Billard)

City Directory 1932 N. Los Angeles St.

Shing Dai, Chinese merchant

Chew Lung Quong, Chinese merchant Barney Katz & Son Barney Katz (Barney and R R) gas sta and garage Yate Quong, Chinese merchant

Hotel de Paris, fur rms

Address City Directory 1929 (east side of N. Los Angeles St. street) 400 Jos (Marienna) Gamba (meats)

E. 1929–1942

Barney Katz garage

Hotel de Paris, fur rms

Café Paris

City Directory 1936 N. Los Angeles St.

Lew W Tung (billiards) Hotel de Paris

City Directory 1942 N. Los Angeles St.

Yate Quong Quong Yate (herbs) (importer) Chinese Free Mason Kong Tong Bing Hall Society (Masonic) / Tong Bing Tong (Chinese) Shanghai Products Co (art gds)

Dumont Garage (Bernard Katz mgr)

Chew Lung Quong

Lew W Tung (billiards) Hotel de Parie

City Directory 1938 N. Los Angeles St. Fat Sam Co (Tea and Coffee)

lost in translation 87

421

419

417

415 ½

415

424

420 ½

420

414

Sun Wing Wo & Co, Chinese merchant

Chinese Nationalist Party Los Angeles branch, David Woo sec

Wo Tong Young Co, Chinese merchant / Shanghai Tea Corp

J R Cate (Hay, straw & feed) Louie Soon, Chinese merchant / Chinese American Citizen Alliance Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Assn

E. 1929–1942 (Continued)

Wing Wo Sun & Co, Chinese merchant Min Tang Kuo of China in America (Chinese Nationalist Party)

Native Sons of the Golden State (Chinese) Los Angeles Parlor Wo Tong Young Co, Chinese merchant

Harry R (Lucile) Cate (hay and grain)

Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Assn

Chinese Consolidated Benefit Assn

Lung Foo Co (S L Lung Jack Quon, genl mdse)

Upper Room Mission Sun Wing Wo & Co Wing Wo Sun & Co Wing Wo Sung & (oriental gds) Co (whol gro) Chinese Aeronautical Assn in America

Ming Tang Kuo of China Assn

Wo Tong Young Co, Wo Tonic Young Co Chinese merchant (herbs)

Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Assn

E H Mitchell (Feed dealer)

88

southern california quarterly

437

431

429

427

425 ½

425

442

440

436

434

430

426

On Guey Co, Chinese merchant

Relief Mission of Jesus Christ (Maria Carpentier supt)

Chung Tin (cigars)

Seik Lew (mgr Sun Wing Wo & Co) Ward Sam & Co, Chinese merchant Brethren Chinese Mission English School

Nin Woo, Chinese merchant

On Guey Co, grocer, Chinese merchant Wong Gett (Mutual Prod Co)

G L Chee

Ward Sam & Co, Chinese merchant Brethren Chinese Mission English School

Plaza Service Station (Harry Yip Spence Chan) Sing Yuen Co

Wo Tong Tai Co (herbs)

Ward Sam & Co, Chinese merchant Brethren Chinese Mission

Lung Quong Chee (druggist)

Sam Ward

Edw H Mitchell (feed)

Sam (Echi) Ward (art/oriental goods)

Lew H Jack (herbs)

Kong Ten Yee Lung Society (Chinese)

lost in translation 89

On Lung Quong Co (Chinese mdse) / On Quong Co, Chinese merchant

Hop Hong Co, Chinese merchant

Lung Fong Co, Chinese merchant

446

448

450

Sing Sam & Co (meats) On Kwong Co (oriental gds)

Hok Hong Co, Hop Hong Co (K T Kwong Wm Fong) oriental goods, stationery and printing Chinese merchant

On Kwong Co

Sing Sam

Chinese Mission (Rev W O Orcutt pastor)

Jin Hing K T Kwong (Hong Hop Co)

On & On Wong Kwong (mgr spices) / On Kwong & Co

These tables reflect all listings for Nigger Alley and North Los Angeles Street for 1905 to 1927, 1929, 1932, 1936, 1938, 1939 and 1942 in the LA City Directories online (LAPL) and at the USC Special Collections. Starting in 1905, both of the street names are used together and more of the businesses are listed on North Los Angeles Street versus Nigger Alley. The year 1912 is the last that there are businesses listed with the street name Nigger Alley. After this year, businesses that were previously listed under Nigger Alley are found under North Los Angeles Street. There is no reference to Nigger Alley after 1918. The main population of the street for most of its history, according to the city directories from 1901 to the 1940s, were Chinese businesses and community organizations. There were also, at times, a few Euro American and Mexican enterprises but no indication of an African American presence on the street at any time in the twentieth century.

Sing Sam & Co (meats)

444

E. 1929–1942 (Continued)

90

southern california quarterly